
fiNHfiasft 
rawfiraKoDS 




WDongBQBHnftQ 

■HP 



WBBKaSWSSQSSti 



dIHHh 

RH^HhRHh 

WMBMWIWllWPfBWB 

BwoHHRnH 
raraS BBSffif 

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




HHnnmB 

MMlllIllIWB 



v^-v v-^-v \ 




4 O 




ESSAYS AND POEMS: 



BY 



JONES VERY. 




BOSTON: 

CHARLES C. LITTLE AND JAMES BROWN. 



MDCCCXXXIX. 









^ 






fctsVt 



-h 



Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1839, by 

CHARLES C. LITTLE AND JAMES BROWN, 

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of Massachusetts, 



Dutton & Wentworth, Print, 



TO 

EDWARD TYRREL CHANNING, 

BOYLSTON PROFESSOR IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY, 

THIS VOLUME IS INSCRIBED, 

AS A TOKEN OP GRATITUDE, 

BY THE AUTHOR. 



CONTENTS. 



Epic Poetry, 
Shakspeare, 
Hamlet, 



ESSAYS. 



POEMS. 



To the Humming Bird, 

Eheu ! fugaces, Posthume, Posthume, Labuntur 

Lines to a withered leaf seen on a poet's table, 

Memory, 

To the painted Columbine, 

To the Fossil Flower, 

To the Canary Bird, 

Nature, 

The Tree, . 

The Stranger's Gift, 

Thy beauty fades, 

Beauty, 

The Wind-Flower, 

The Robin, 

The Columbine, 

The New Birth, 

The Son, . 

In Him we live, 

Enoch, 



anni, 



1 

39 
83 



107 
109 
110 
111 
112 
114 
117 
118 
119 
120 
121 
122 
123 
124 
125 
126 
127 
128 
129 



VI 



CONTENTS. 



The Mornimg Watch, 

The Living- God, 

The Garden, . 

The Song, 

Love, . 

Day, 

Night, . 

The Latter Rain, 

The Slave, . 

Br»ead, 

The Spiiit Land, 

Worship, . 

The Soldier, . 

The Trees of Life, 

The Spirit, 

The Presence, 

The Dead, 

I was sick and in prison, 

The Violet, . 

The Heart, 

The Robe, 

Life, 

The War, 

The Grave Yard, . 

Thy Brother's Blood, 

The Jew, . 

Faith, . 

The Ark, . 

The Earth, 

The Rose, . 

Morning, 

Nature, 

Change, 

The Poor, . 

The Clay, 





CONTENTS. 


Vll 


Who hath ears to hear let him hear, 


165 


To the pure all things are pure, 


. 166 


He was acquainted with 


grief, . 


167 


Ye gave me no meat, 


. 


. 168 


The Acorn, 




169 


The Rail Road, 


. 


170 


The Disciple, 




171 


Time, . 




. 172 


The Call, . 




173 


The Cottage, . 




. 174 


The Prayer, 




175 



EPIC POETRY 



The poets of the present day who would raise the 
epic song cry out, like Archimedes of old, " give us 
a place to stand on and we will move the world." 
This is, as we conceive, the true difficulty. Glanc- 
ing for a moment at the progress of epic poetry, we 
shall see that the obscurity of fabulous times could 
be adapted to the earliest development only of the 
heroic character. There is an obvious incongruity 
in making times so far remote the theatre on which 
to represent the heroism of a civilized age ; and it 
adds still more to the difficulty, that, although the 
darkness of fable still invests them, reason will no 
longer perceive the beings which the infant credulity 
of man once saw there. 

To men in the early stages of society their phys- 
ical existence must seem almost without end, and 
they live on through life with as little reference te 
1 



*Z EPIC POETRY. 

another state of being as we ourselves do in child- 
hood. To minds in this state there was a remoteness 
in an event which had taken place one or two 
centuries before, of which we cannot conceive, and 
which rendered the time that Homer had chosen for 
his subject, though not materially differing in charac- 
ter, sufficiently remote for his purpose. If to these 
advantages possessed by Homer we add those which 
belonged to him from the religion of his times and 
from tradition, whose voice is to the poet more 
friendly than the plain written records of history, 
we must confess that the spot on which he built up 
his scenes of heroic wonder was peculiarly favor* 
able. The advance, which the human mind had 
made towards civilization, prevented Virgil from 
making a like impression on his own age. To 
awaken admiration, he too was obliged to break 
from the bonds of the present, and soar beyond the 
bounds of history, before he could throw his spell of 
power over the mind. Why had he less influence ? 
Because he could not, like Homer, carry into the 
past the spirit of his times. To the enlarged minds 
of Virgil's day, the interval between the siege of 
Troy and their own time did not seem wider than it 
did to those who lived in the time of Homer. The 
true distance in time was chosen by each, but the 
character of iEneas did not possess those great 
attributes which could render it the Achilles of the 



EPIC POETRY. S 

Romans. Lucan, while his characters exhibit the 
true heroic spirit of his age, fails of giving to them 
their due influence, from the want of some region of 
fiction beyond the dominion of history in which to 
place them. He cannot break from the present with- 
out violating every law of probability. To escape 
this thraldom and reach a point from which the 
heroic character of their age might be seen dilated 
to its full height, modern poets have fled beyond the 
bounds of time and woke the echoes of eternity. 
It was only from this point that the Christian world 
could be moved ; it is only in that region without 
bounds, that the heroism of immortality can be 
shown in visible action. Milton and Dante chose 
this spot, on which with almost creative power they 
might show to mankind worlds of their own, " won 
from the void and formless In finite, " and from 
which their own heroic spirits might be reflected 
back upon their own times in all their gigantic pro- 
portions. But such has been the progress of the 
human mind since their time, that it would seem to 
have reached already another stage in its develop- 
ment, to have unfolded a new form of the heroic 
character, one which finds no paradise, nay, no 
heaven for itself in the creations of Milton, and for 
which the frowns of Dante's hell have no terror. 
This new page of the heroic character naturally 
leads us to inquire, whether we are to have no great 



4 EPIC POETRY. 

representation of it, no embodying of this spirit in 
some gigantic form of action, which shall stalk 
before the age, and by the contemplation of which 
our minds may be fired to nobler deeds. 

In considering this question, we shall endeavor to 
show what reasons there are for not expecting another 
great epic poem, drawn from the principles of epic 
poetry and the human mind, and that these present 
an insuperable barrier to the choice of a subject, 
which shall exhibit the present development of the 
heroic character in action. 

In doing this I shall exhibit, by an analysis of 
the Iliad, the true model of an epic poem, its 
origin and peculiarities, and in what manner those 
peculiarities have been changed, and, at last, lost by 
succeeding poets, according to the development of 
the heroic character in their several eras. 

I shall thus be led to show that the taking away 
of the peculiarities of epic interest, and the final 
emerging of that interest in the dramatic, is the 
natural result of the influences to which the human 
mind in its progress is subjected ; and that that influ- 
ence, while it precludes all former subjects from 
representing the present development of the heroic 
character, throws, at the same time, an insuperable 
barrier in the way of any subject. 

Looking upon Homer, at least as regards the Iliad, 
as a single man speaking throughout with one accent 



EPIC POETRY. 5 

of voice, one form of language, and one expression 
of feeling, we leave to the framers of modern para- 
doxes the question, whether this name is a type or 
not, and proceed to consider what might be the 
probable origin of the Iliad, and what it is which 
constitutes it the true model of an epic poem, a more 
perfect visible manifestation of the heroic character 
than can be again presented to the eyes of man. 
In a philosophical analysis of such a poem as the 
Iliad or Odyssey, made with reference to its epic 
peculiarities, there is great danger of misconceiving 
the history and character of early heroic poetry, 
thus giving to the poet a plan which he never 
formed, or a moral which he never conceiv- 
ed. The simplest conception of the origin and 
plan of the Iliad must, we think, prove the most 
correct. It originated, doubtless, in that desire,^ 
which every great poet must especially feel, of 
revealing to his age forms of nobler ,heauty and 
heroism than dwell in the minds of those around 
him. Wandering, as his active imagination must 
have led him to do, in the days of the past, Homer 
must have been led by the fitness of the materials 
presented to him in the siege of Troy, by their 
remoteriessjfrom his own time, and the interest with 
which they would be viewed by the mass of his 
countrymen, as descendants of the Grecian heroes, 
to the choice of a subject, which seemed to present 



D EPIC POETRY. 

a worthy form in which to manifest the workings of 
his soul. His enthusiasm would doubtless prompt 
him to the execution of detached parts before he 
had completed his general plan, and the various 
incidents, which constitute so much of the charm 
and interest of his poem as they suggested them- 
selves to his mind, would also direct him to the great 
point round which they all revolved. The influence 
upon the several parts, resulting from the contem- 
plation of the chief character, would thus give all 
the unity to the subject which we find in fact to 
belong to the earliest forms of a nation's poetry.; 
" Passion to excite sympathy, variety to prevent dis- 
gust flowing in a free stream of narrative verse, not 
the intricacy and dove-tailing of modern epics, is to 
be looked for in the Iliad ; for it was not made like 
a modern epic to be read in our closets, but to be 
presented only in fragments before the minds of an 
audience. Thus the single combats of Menelaus 
and Paris, the funeral games of Patroclus, and the 
restitution and burial of the body of Hector are 
generally complete in themselves, yet having an ob- 
vious connexion as still telling the same great tale of 
Troy." So much for the origin and fable of the Iliad. 
The genius displayed in its grand and compre- 
hensive design is only equalled by the judgment 
manifested in confining the action to the busiest 
and most interesting period of the Trojan war, in 



EPIC POETRY. 7 

thus uniting in his plan and bringing forward in his 
details everything which could lay hold of the affec- 
tions, the prejudices, and vanity of his countrymen. 
Of his characters we need only say that, like those 
of Shakspeare, they are stamped with nature's own 
image and superscription. Though all are possessed 
of valor and courage, yet they are so distinguished 
from one another by certain peculiarities of dispo- 
sition and manners, that to distinguish them it is 
hardly necessary to hear their names. Achilles is 
brave, and Hector is brave, so are Ajax, Menelaus, 
and Diomede ; but the bravery of Hector is not of 
the same kind with that of Ajax, and no one will 
mistake the battle -shout of the son of Atreus for the 
war-cry of Tydides. 

Homer's machinery, as all epic machinery must! 
•be, was founded on the popular belief in the visible 
appearance of tl*e gods ; and on account of this y 
belief he was not less favored by the circumstances 
under which he introduced them, than he was by 
those which enabled him to represent his heroes. 
It cast around his whole subject a sublimity which it 
could not otherwise have had, giving occasion to 
noble description, and tending to excite that admira-( 
tion which is the leading aim of the epic. —J 

We have made this analysis of the Iliad, to show 
in what way all things combined in Homer's age to 
assist him in giving a perfect outward manifestation 



8 EPIC POETRY. 

of the heroic character of his times. He wrote w 
that stage of society when man's physical existence 
assumed an importance in the mind, like that of our 
immortality, and gave to all without a power and 
dignity not their own. This it was w T hich imparted 
an heroic greatness to war which cannot now be 
seen in it. That far-reaching idea of time, which 
seems to expand our thoughts with limitless existence, 
gives to our mental struggles a greatness they could 
not have before had. We each of us feel within 
our own bosoms a great, an immortal foe, which, if 
we have subdued, we may meet with calmness every 
other, knowing that earth contains no greater ; but 
which, if we have not, it will continually appear in 
those petty contests with others by which we do but 
show our own cowardice. The Greeks, on the con- 
trary, lived only for their country, and drew every- 
thing within the sphere of their national views; 
their highest exemplification of morality was patriot- 
ism. Of Homer's heroes it may with peculiar pro- 
priety be said that they were but children of a larger 
growth, and they could have no conception of power 
that was not perceived in its visible effects. " The 
world," as Milton says of our first parents, "was all 
before them," and not within them, and their mission 
was to go forth and make a material impression on 
the material world. The soul of Homer was the 
mirror of this outward world, and in his verse we 



EPIC POETRY. y 

have it shown to us with the distinctness and reality^ 
of the painter's page. Lucan calls him the prince 
of painters, and with him Cicero agrees, when he 
says, " Quse species ac forma pugnse, quse acies r 
quod remigium, qui motus hominum, qui ferarum 
non ita expictus est, ut quse ipse non viderit, nos ut 
videremus efffecerit ? " It is needless perhaps to say 
that this state of the mind gives both a reason and 
excuse for those many epithets, which a false criti- 
cism and a false delicacy of taste is so fond of 
censuring. Such critics would blame the poet for 
praising the physical strength of his heroes, in short 
for representing his gods such as they were believed 
to be, and painting his warriors such as they were- 
When we look back upon the pages of their history, 
we cannot contemplate the greatness there exhibited,, 
without a feeling of sorrow that they had not lived 
under influences as favorable as our own, without a 
sense of un worthiness at not having exhibited char- 
acters corresponding with the high privileges we 
enjoy. We respect that grandeur of mind in the 
heroes of Homer which led them to sacrifice a mere 
earthly existence for the praise of all coming ages. 
They have not been disappointed. Worlds to them 
unknown have read of their deeds, and generations, 
yet unborn shall honor them. They live on a page 
which the finger of time strives in vain to efface, 
which shall ever remain an eternal monument of 



10 EPIC POETRY, 

disgrace to those of after times, who, though gifted 
with higher views of excellence, have yet striven to 
erect a character on deeds like theirs. We rever- 
ence not in Hector and Achilles the mere display of 
physical power, we reverence not the manners of 
their times which but too often call forth our horror 
and disgust ; but we do reverence and honor those 
motives which even in the infancy of the human 
mind served to raise it above the dominion of sense, 
and taught it to grasp at a life beyond the narrow 
limits of its earthly vision. 

This state of things gave to the Iliad and Odyssey 
that intense epic interest, which we fail to find in 
later heroic poems. As the mind advances, a 
stronger sympathy with the inner man of the heart 
is more and more felt, and becomes more and more 
the characteristic of literature. In the expanded 
mind and cultivated affections, a new interest is 
awakened, dramatic poetry succeds the epic, thus 
satisfying the want produced by the farther devel- 
opment of our nature. For the interest of the epic 
consists in that character of greatness that in the 
infancy of the mind is given to physical action and 
the objects associated with it ; but the interest of the 
drama consists in those mental struggles which pre- 
cede physical action, and to which in the progress 
of man the greatness of the other becomes subor- 
dinate. For as the mind expands and the moral 



EPIC POETRY. 11 

power is developed, the mightiest conflicts are bom 
within, — outward actions lose their grandeur, except 
to the eye, for the soul looks upon them but as 
results of former battles won and lost, upon whose 
decision, and upon whose alone, its destiny hung. 
This is the mystery of that calm, more awful than 
the roar of battle, which rests on the spirits of the 
mighty, and which the hand of the Grecian sculptor 
strove to fix on the brow of his god. Though Homer 
has given variety to his poem by the introduction of 
dialogue, and thus rendered it, in one sense, often 
dramatic ; yet we find it is the mere transferring of 
the narrative from his own lips to those of others. 
The interest is still toithout, it is not the interest of 
sentiment, but of description. This character of~1 
the Greeks, as might be supposed, is shown in their 
language ; and illustrates their tendency in early 
times to look upon themselves in all reflex acts, 
whether external or internal, as patients rather 
than agents ; a tendency to use the words of another, 
which is exemplified in every page of the Homeric 
poems, and which belongs more or less to every 
people in an early stage of civilization, before the 
nation comes of age, and acquires the consciousness 
along with the free use of its powers. This seems_ 
to be the reason why so many of the verbs em- 
ployed by the Greeks to denote states of mind or of 
feeling, have a passive form, such as (Pgdt'Qopcu, 



12 EPIC POETRY. 

Ol'ofiaVj Alcrd'uvo i uai i Sx&mopai, ' Enlorctfiai, Bov~ 
lopou, &c. " Men's minds," as Shakspeare has 
somewhere said, u are parcel of their fortunes," and 
his age was necessary and alone suited to the mind 
of Homer. Man viewed himself with reference to 
the world ; not, as in the present day, the world in 
reference to himself; and it was this state of the 
mind which then made the taking of Troy the point 
of epic interest. 

We have thus endeavored to show that the mani- 
festation of the heroic character in the time of 
Homer w r as perfectly exhibited in outward visible 
action, and that this reflected from the soul of the 
poet addressed to a seeing and listening, rather than 
a reading people, was the poetry of fancy rather 
than sentiment. Events, characters, superstitions, 
customs, and traditions, all combined in rendering 
the Iliad a perfect embodying of the perfect outward 
manifestation of the heroic character of that period. 
The poetry of the senses, the reflection merely of 
nature and of heroic achievements, is not suscepti- 
ble of indefinite progress ; it must evidently be most 
perfect when the objects of visible action are noblest, 
and we view all else only with reference to those 
actions. The epic poetry of the Greeks corresponds 
to sculpture, and in the one, as in the other, the 
outward forms of life and action live and will ever 
live unrivalled. 



EPIC POETRY. 13 

It is not our purpose to show the adaptation 
of the rules of Aristotle to the Iliad, since from this 
those rules were drawn, — we would only say that 
according to the spirit of those rules every true epic 
must be formed. They are not the arbitrary decis- 
ions of a critic, but the voice of nature herself 
speaking through her interpreter. Aristotle studied 
nature in Homer ; he gave no arbitrary rules, he 
did but trace the pleasing effects produced on the 
mind, and taught upon what those effects depended. 
He may have erred in drawing his rules from one 
development of the heroic character ; but this was 
the fault of his times, not of his judgment. He did 
not mean that succeeding poets should bow to him, 
but should reverence those great principles to which 
he had shown that nature herself had conformed in 
her noblest work. The true poet will look without 
for no rules drawn from others ; he feels within 
himself the living standard of the great and beau- 
tiful, and bows to that alone : as far as it has become 
changed by human error or imperfection, he would 
gladly restore it to its original purity, by a conform- 
ity to those universal laws of sublimity and beauty, 
which the critic has shown to be followed by nature 
herself. 

When Aristotle tells us that the action of an epic 
should be one and entire, and that it should be a 
great action, he tells us of what constitutes its 



14 EPIC POETRY* 

essence, and of that without which it ceases to be 
such a poem. It must be one and entire that the 
interest may not be distracted, and that the mind 
may feel the harmony of all its proportions. It is 
not the poet of fancy who can bind by his spell the 
parts of such a fabric, it is the poet who has felt 
more strongly than any other the great moral wants 
of his age, that can give to such a work its unity and 
power. It has been well said that in reading the 
gay creations of Ariosto, — of his fairy bowers and 
castles and palaces, — we are for a moment charmed 
and wrapt in pleasant reveries, but they are but 
dreams ; the impression is soon shaken off; we are 
conscious of no master-feeling round which they 
gather, and which alone could render his poem an 
epic, the noblest of harmonious creations. But in 
reading the Iliad, or a tragedy like Lear or Macbeth, 
or in looking sometime at a painting on which the 
moral sentiment of the artist is as strongly impressed 
as his imagination, instead of being obliged to humor 
the fancy that the charm may be kept alive, we 
shall with difficulty shake off the impression, when 
it is necessary to return to the real business of life. 
It is in the greatness of the epic action that the 
poets succeeding Homer, if we except Milton have 
failed ; and the causes which have operated against 
them, will always operate with increasing force 
against every attempt to represent the present or 



EPIC POETRY. 15 

future development of the heroic character in action. 
It is in the childhood of the human mind alone, that 
the interval between thought and action is the widest, 
and therefore it is then alone that the events occu- 
pying that interval can be best described. The 
great struggle of the epic poets since the time of 
Homer has been against this narrowing of their 
field of action, and making the instruments there 
employed less visible, less tangible. The wonder 
and interest of the world is now. transferred to the 
mind, whose thought is action, and whose word is 
power. Lord Karnes therefore erred, when he said 
" that it was the familiarity of modern manners 
that unqualified them for epic poetry, and that the 
dignity of present manners would be better under- 
stood in future ages, when they are no longer 
familiar." The fact is, our manners, or the manners 
and actions of any intellectual nation, can never 
become the representatives of greatness, — they 
have fallen from the high sphere which they occu- 
pied in a less advanced stage of the human mind, 
never to regain it. This will account for the appear*. 1 
ance among us of such works as the " Sartor Resar- 
tus," whose object is to impress the forms of physical 
life with a greatness no longer belonging to them, 
and which we recognise only in spiritual action. 

These remarks will show why it was that Virgil 
failed in making the same impression on his age, 



16 EPIC POETRY. 

that was made by his great model. His poem is 
but a lunar reflection of the Iliad ; and it was per- 
haps from a deep consciousness of this, that he 
ordered it in his will to be burned. That poem, 
which was the natural expression of the early fea- 
tures of society, could only be faintly copied by the 
mimic hand of art. Virgil's subject is well chosen, 
and would not have shone with reflected light had it 
been treated of in the early days of Rome. He 
summoned again from their long sleep the heroes 
and gods of Troy, but they appeared with dim- 
med glory amid the brightness of another age. He 
had, as we have before observed, chosen the right 
point in time for his action, a time of tradition, 
affording him all the advantages possessed by Ho- 
mer, but not to transgress the laws of probabil- 
ity, he could not give his hero the character of 
another age, he could not make iEneas the Achilles 
of the Romans. Virgil as well as Lucan has been 
blamed by the critics ; the one, for not giving to 
his hero the dignity of thought becoming the heroic 
character of his own time ; the other, for not placing 
his action beyond the strict bounds of history. In 
regard to each we think the critics have erred ; for 
neither the time nor the characters could* have been 
changed without producing a strange incongruity. 

Thus the epic poets of Greece and Rome, who 
succeeded Homer, must have labored under peculiar 



EPIC POETRY. 17 

disadvantages to which those of modern times are 
are not subjected. If, like Virgil, they had chosen 
the same time for their action with Homer, they 
1 could not transfer to it the heroic spirit of their own 
day, at least, in its noblest development, — they 
could not make a Cato or a Brutus cotemporary with 
an Achilles or an Ajax ; — they must evoke the 
heroic spirits of other days, spirits reluctant to obey 
the spells employed by the magicians of another 
age. Virml, as well as every other poet whose 
action lies in times very far distant from his own, 
has not the greatest difficulty to overcome, in exhib- 
iting characters moved by those same affections and 
sympathies which unite the ceaseless generations of 
men, in giving to the slumbering past the emotions 
of the present ; but in adapting to the story of a 
former age, and perhaps foreign nation, that peculiar 
system of manners which constitutes the outward 
development of the heroic spirit, and of which no 
mind, but such as has been subjected to its actual 
influence, can either strongly feel or vividly describe. 
These manners perish with their age, — there is no 
hand of enchantment to wave over them and convert 
them, like the fabled city of Arabian romance, into 
living stone ; no convulsion of nature, like that 
which covered Pompeii, to wrap them in a veil 
which future ages might withdraw, and permit them, 
untouched by the hand of time, to stand unimpaired 
2 



18 EPIC POETRY. 

amid the ruins of the past, and gaze with wonder on 
the new-risen generations of men. But if, like 
Lucan, they took their subject from the hands of 
History, the skepticism of a more advanced age 
deprived them of the use of machinery, and conse- 
quently of the power of exciting that admiration, 
which is the leading aim of the epic poem. We 
need not stop to show how ridiculous Iris would have 
appeared on the plains of Pharsalia bringing a sword 
to Pompey, or Venus coming to snatch hup away in 
a cloud. It is evident that the poet, forced to follow 
in the same path with the historian, must feel the 
bonds of reality continually restraining and checking 
his native energies. 

These difficulties the influence of Christianity 
overcame, but subjected the epic poet to others still 
more discouraging, as I shall endeavor to show by a 
brief reference to Tasso, Dante, and Milton. 

The subject chosen by Tasso, and the time of the 
action of his poem, bore the same relation to Chris- 
tian civilization as Homer's did to Grecian. It was 
the only age in which the heroic Christian character 
could be fully manifested in outward action. This 
resulted from a peculiar state of the mind which, as 
we have said in regard to heroic manners, perishes 
with its age, with the circumstances that called it 
forth. It was a new development of the Homeric 
spirit modified by Christianity. The interest as in 



EPIC POETRY. 19 

the Iliad and iEneid is all without, and this it is I 
which gives to the poem of Tasso, as to the other 
| two, the true epic interest, and adds a dignity to the 
i manners of these poems belonging to no other, 
where the subject is taken from the common events 
of life. The subject, too, as it presented a scene 
for the display of action resulting from a purer faith, 
possesses a dignity far surpassing that of his two 
great predecessors. Thus fortunate in his subject 
and in the time of his action, he was equally favored 
by the popular belief of his age. By the supersti- 
tion of his own time he was enabled to oppose with 
success the light of reality which was thrown around 
his subject by history, and give to it that supernatu- 
ral interest, which is found so capable of exciting 
admiration. However, in our cooler moments, we 
may laugh at his magicians and their incantations, 
as they are not mere embodied abstractions, like 
Voltaire's agents, but founded on the actual belief 
of his day, they will always possess a reality to the 
mind ; and, when in reading we have yielded for a 
time to our feelings, will again assert their power. 
We have placed Tasso before Dante, in order of 
time, because he has given an earlier development 
of the heroic character. He would, doubtless, have 
possessed as well as Virgil, whom he has so closely 
followed, greater originality, and more strongly ex- 



20 EPIC POETRY. 

hibited that development, had he lived nearer the 
age he endeavored to portray. 

j The effect of Christianity was to make the indi- 
vidual mind the great object of regard, the centre of 
eternal interest, and transferring the scene of action 
from the outward world to the world within, to give 
to all modern literature the dramatic tendency, — 

, and as the mind of Homer led him to sing of the 

- physical conflicts of his heroes with visible gods 

without ; so the soul of the modern poet, feeling 

itself contending with motives of godlike power 

within, must express that conflict in the dramatic 

jform, in the poetry of sentiment. Were the present 
a fit opportunity, Shakspeare might afford us still 
farther illustrations of this truth, and especially in 
the character of Hamlet, of whom a critic has truly 
said, " we love him not, we think of him not, be- 
cause he is witty, because he was melancholy, 
because he was filial ; but we love him because he 
existed, and was himself. This is the sum total of 
the impression. I believe that of every other char- 
acter, either in tragic or epic poetry, the story 
makes part of the conception ; but of Hamlet the 
deep and permanent interest is the conception of 
himself. This seems to belong not to the character 
being more perfectly drawn, but to there being a 
more intense conception of individual human life, 
than perhaps in any other human composition." 



EPIC POETRY. 21 

The Sartor Resartus, Lamartine's Pilgrimage, Words- 
worth's poem on the Growth of an Individual Mind, 
all obey the same law, — which is, that as Chris- 
tianity influences us, we shall lay open to the world 
what has been long hidden, what has before been 
done in the secret corners of our own bosoms ; the 
knowledge of which can alone make our intercourse 
with those about us different from what it is too fast 
becoming, an intercourse of the eye and the ear and 
the hand and the tongue. This may serve to reveal 
to us more clearly the principle which led to the 
selection of the subjects of all the great epic poems 
of modern times ; for it was only by making man 
the subject, around which might be gathered the 
material forms of grandeur and beauty, that an 
interest could be imparted to the epic corresponding 
to that of the drama. The poem of Tasso formsj 
the only exception to this remark, and this, as we 
have shown, does but confirm our observation ; for 
it represents the mind essentially pagan, yet moved 
by Christianity, and finding, like the Greek, all its 
motive for action without. Our interest in the poem 
is consequently much less than in those which ex- 
hibit the later developments of the Christian heroic 
character. 

By removing the bounds of time, Christianity has, 
I think, rendered every finite subject unsuited for an 
epic poem. The Christian creed, in opening the J 



22 EPIC POETRY. 

vista of eternity before the poet's view, and leaving 
him unrestrained by prescriptive forms, while it 
freed him from the bonds of history, by giving him 
a place beyond its limits where he might transfer 
the heroic spirit of his age, and surround his heroes 
with supernatural agents, capable of raising for his 
action the highest admiration, subjected him to a far 
greater difficulty than any yet experienced by former 
poets ; that of finding a subject, an action to fill 
those boundless realms of space, and call forth the 
energies of the spirits that people it. In considering 
the efforts which Christian poets have made to over- 
come this difficulty, and bridge the space between 
time and eternity, we shall find the great reason for 
not expecting another attempt, so successful as that 
made by Milton, arising from circumstances which 
have rendered the difficulty far more formidable 
since his time. 

If we consider Tasso as having chosen a subject 
exhibiting the first development of the Christian 
heroic character, the poem of Dante will exhibit to 
us the second. Though not an epic, if viewed with 
reference to classical models whose aim and spirit 
were intrinsically different from any produced since, 
it will serve to show how the genius of Dante over- 
came the difficulty we have mentioned. His poem 
is unique, but produced under circumstances which 
would have rendered it, if the obstacles we have 



EPIC POETRY. 23 

alluded to had not opposed, a regular epic poem. 
It had its origin, like other sublime works of genius, 
in that desire, which is continually felt by the greatest 
minds, of giving to their age a copy of their own 
souls, and embodied the vague but universal spirit 
of the times when it was written. Its foundations 
were the popular creed of all Christendom ; its 
supports, the deep reasonings and curious subtilties 
of countless theologians ; and the scenes it represents, 
such as had long formed the dreams of many a 
monk on Vallombrosa, and perhaps entered into the 
sermon of every preacher in Europe. 

Thus, although the circumstances which gave 
birth to Dante's poem, were, if we may so say, epic, 
yet the form which that poem took, shows the 
hostility which the Christian influence has towards 
the strictly classical model. That influence had 
already divested of its greatness every subject like 
that of Homer's or Virgil's, and turned upon himself, 
as an individual, the interest which man in their 
times had given to the outward world. It is in 
Dante's poem that we find man, as a physical being, 
first made the great point of epic interest. He is 
the first epic poet that exhibits the tendency we have 
so often alluded to. Favored beyond succeeding \ 
poets by the belief of his age, he was enabled to 
gather around man beings which his ignorance and 
fear shrouded in a sublimity not their own. That 



24 EPIC POETRY. 

a 

strange world of beings, which the spirit creates for 
itself, has fled before the light of science ; their 
forms no longer float in the fairy halls of earth, nor 
throng the untravelled regions of space. Their 
foot-prints, which our infant eyes saw impressed on 
this strange world of ours, and which once conjured 
up so many and wondrous shapes of beauty or 
terror, tell us now but of one creative spirit in whom 
we recognise our Father. 

" The intelligible forms of ancient poets, 
The fair humanities of old religion, 
The power, the beauty, and the majesty 
That had their haunts in dale, or piny mountain, 
Or forest by slow stream, or pebbly spring, 
Or chasms or watery depths, — all these have 

vanished ; 
They live no longer in the faith of reason." 

m Dante's time, Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven 
had long been considered as the separate states in 
which vice and virtue would meet their fitting re- 
ward. This belief had been taught by signs and 
emblems; and those of his day had been made to 
learn rather through the medium of their senses, 
than the silent arguments of conscience " accusing 
or excusing itself," what were the rewards and 
punishments of the future worlds This material 



EPIC POETRY. 25 

development of Christianity it was Dante's mission 
to hold up to his age, and upon that age it must have 
had and did have its greatest influence ; for it was 
produced by the power of materiality which is 
lessened with every advance of the Christian char- 
acter. His poem plainly shows that the tendency 
which Christianity gave to poetry was not to the 
epic but to the dramatic form, and if it freed the 
heroic poet from difficulties to which he was before 
liable, it also exposed him to another, which, although 
evaded by Milton, must in the end prove fatal. 

The next and highest development of the heroic 
character, yet shown in action, was that exhibited by 
the sublime genius of Milton. The mind had taken 
a flight above the materiality of Dante, and resting 
between that and the pure spirituality of the present 
day, afforded him a foundation for his action. He 
could not adopt altogether the material or the imma- 
terial system, and he therefore raised his structure 
on the then debatable ground. The greatest objec- 
tion, which our minds urge against his agents, is the 
incongruity between their spiritual properties and 
the human modes of existence, he was obliged to 
ascribe to them. But this is an objection of our 
own times, of men requiring a more spiritual repre- 
sentation of the mind's action, which, if it cannot 
be given, must preclude the possibility of another 
great epic. In fact, Milton's poem but confirms 



26 EPIC POETRY. 

more strongly the conclusion we drew from Dante's, 
that dramatic is supplying the place of epic interest. 
His long deliberation in the choice of a subject 
suited to his conceptions, shows the difficulty then 
lying in the way of an epic ; and his first intention 
of making Paradise Lost a tragedy, shows whence 
this difficulty originated. The tendency of the 
mind, to which we have before alluded, and which 
had grown yet stronger in Milton's time than be- 
fore, compelled him to make choice of the Fall 
of Man as his subject ; a subject exclusive in its 
nature, being the only one which to our minds pos- 
sesses a great epic interest. The interest of his 
poem depends upon the strong feeling we have of 
our own free agency, and of the almost infinite 
power it is capable of exercising. An intense feel- 
ing of this kind seems to have pervaded Milton's 
whole life, and by this he was probably directed in 
the choice of his theme. We find in his " Speech 
for the Liberty of unlicensed Printing," written 
many years before the conception of his poem, a 
sentence confirming this supposition. " Many," says 
he, " there be that complain of Divine Providence 
for suffering Adam to transgress. Foolish tongues ! 
When God gave him reason, he gave him freedom 
to choose ; for reason is but choosing. He had been 
else a mere artificial Adam, such an Adam as he is 
in the motions. We ourselves esteem not of that 



EPIC POETRY. 27 

obedience or love or gift which is of force." This 
feeling becomes stronger the more the mind is influ- 
enced by Christianity, and this it is which has trans- 
ferred the interest from the outward manifestation of 
the passions exhibited in the Iliad, to those inward 
struggles made by a power greater than they to 
control them, and cause them, instead of bursting 
forth like lava-torrents to devour and blast the face 
of nature, to flow on like meadow-streams of life 
and joy. Why then it may be asked do we take an 
interest in Homer's heroes, whom the gods are ready 
every moment to shield or snatch from the dubious 
fight ? Not, I answer, because we consider them 
mere machines acting but from others' impulses, for 
then we could take no interest in them ; but because 
when 

" Arms on armor clashing bray 

Horrible discord, and the madding wheels 

Of brazen chariots rage," 

we give to them our own freedom ; or because the 
gods themselves, whom Homer has called down to 
swell the fight, and embodied in his heroes ; because 
these create the interest and make what were before 
mere puppets free agents. When, in our cooler 
moments, we reflect on his Jove-protected warriors, 
his invulnerable Achilles, — they dwindle into insig- 
nificance, and we are ready to exclaim in the quaint 



28 EPIC POETRY. 

language of another, " Bully Dawson would have 
fought the devil with such advantages." 

This sense of free agency is what constitutes 
Adam the hero of Paradise Lost, and makes him 
capable of sustaining the immense weight of interest, 
which in this poem is made to rest upon him. But 
that which renders Adam the hero of the poem, 
makes Satan still more so ; for Milton has opened to 
our gaze, within his breast of flame, passions of 
almost infinite growth, burning with intensest rage* 
There is seen a conflict of " those thoughts that 
wander through eternity," at the sight of which we 
lose all sense of the material terrors of that fiery 
hell around him, and compared with which the 
physical conflict of the archangels is a mockery. 
It is not so much that battles present less a subject 
for description than they did in the time of Homer, 
that they fail to awaken those feelings of admiration 
they then did, but because we have become sensible 
of a power within which bids the tide of war roll 
back upon its fountains. For the same reason it is 
that the manners of civilized nations are unsuited 
for heroic song. They are no longer the represen- 
tatives of greatness ; for the heroism of Christianity 
is not seen so much in the outward act, as in the 
struggle of the will to control the springs of action. 
It is this which gives to tragedy its superiority over 
the epic at the present day ; it strikes off the chains 



EPIC POETRY. 29 

of wonder by which man has been so long fettered 
to the objects of sense, and, instead of calling upon 
him to admire the torrent-streams of war, it bids 
the bosom open whence they rushed, and points him 
downward to their source, the ocean might of the 
soul, 

M Dark — heaving — boundless, endless, and sub- 
lime — 
The image of eternity — the throne 
Of the Invisible." 

Thus Milton's poem is the most favorable model 
we can have of a Christian epic. The subject of it 
afforded him the only field of great epic interest, 
where the greatest power could be shown engaged 
in bringing about the greatest results. Adam is not 
so much the Achilles as the Troy of the poem. 
And there is no better proof that greatness has left" i 
the material throne, which she has so long held, for 
a spiritual one, than that Milton, in putting in motion 
that vast machinery which he did to effect his pur- 
pose, seems as if he made, like Ptolemy, the sun 
and all the innumerable hosts of heaven again to 
revolve about this little spot of earth. Though he 
has not made the Fall of Man a tragedy in form, 
as he first designed, he has yet made it tragic in 
spirit ; and the epic form it has taken seems but the 



30 EPIC POETRY. 

drapery of another interest. .This proves that, how- 
ever favored by his subject, the epic poet of our day 
may be, he must by the laws of his own being 
possess an introspective mind, and give that which 
Bacon calls an inwardness of meaning to his char- 
acters, which, in proportion as the mind advances, 
must diminish that greatness once shown in visible 
action. The Christian Knights might well exclaim, 
when they first saw gunpowder used in war, as 
Plutarch tells us the king of Sparta did, when he 
saw a machine for the casting of stones and darts, 
that it was " the grave of valor." They were the 
graves of that personal valor which is shown in 
its perfection in the infancy of the mind, and which 
is imaged in the pages of Homer. In modern bat- 
tles, the individuality of early times is lost and 
merged in one great head, with reference to which 
we view all results. The men upon whom the 
superior mind acts are mere mechanical instruments 
of its power, and the deeds seen by the outward 
eye are thus dimmed by the soul's quicker perception 
of spiritual action. Thus the intellectual power 
wielded by the commander seems already to have 
decided the battle, and we look with less interest upon 
his army's incursions into the territory of an enemy. 
As Sallust says of Jugurtha, " totum regnum animo 
jam invaserat." 

To complain of this tendency of the human mind 



EPIC POETRY, 31 

and its influence on literature, to sigh that we cannot^ 
have another Homeric poem, is like weeping for the ! 
feeble days of childhood, and shows an insensibility 
to the ever-increasing beauty and grandeur devel- 
oped by the spirit in its endless progress, a forget- 
fulness of those powers of soul which result from 
this very progress, which enable it, while enjoying 
the present, to add to that joy by the remembrance 
of the past, and to grasp at a higher from the antici- . 
pations of the future. With the progress of the., 
arts, power is manifested by an agency almost as 
invisible as itself; it almost speaks and it is done, it 
almost commands and it stands fast. Man needs no 
longer a vast array of physical means to effect his 
loftiest purpose ; he seizes the quill, the mere toy of 
a child, and stamps on the glowing page the copy 
of his own mind, his thoughts pregnant with celestial 
fire, and sends them forth, wherever the winds of 
heaven blow or its light penetrates, the winged mes- 
sengers of his pleasure. The narrow walls of 
patriotism are broken down, and he is a brother on 
w T hom the same sun shines, and who holds the same 
heritage, the earth. He is learning to reverse the 
order in which the ancients looked at the outward 
creation, he looks at the world with reference to 
himself, and not at himself with reference to the 
world. How different the view which Virgil takes 



32 EPIC POETRY. 






of his country from that of the Christian poet ; yet 
-each how worthy of its age ! 

" Sed neque Medorum silvse, ditissima terra, 
Nee pulcher Ganges, atque auro turbidus Hermus, 
Laudibus Italise certent ; non Bactra, neque Indi, 
Totaque thuriferis Panchaia pinguis arenis. 
Hsec loca non tauri spirantes naribus ignem 
Invertere, satis immanis dentibus hydri ; 
Nee galeis densisque virum seges horruit hastis : 
Sed gravida? fruges et Bacchi Massicus humor 
Implevere ; tenent olese, armentaque loeta. 
Hinc bellator equus campo sese arduus infert ; 
Hinc albi, Clitumne, greges, et maxima taurus 
Victima, soepe tuo perfusi flumine sacro, 
Eomanos ad templa deum duxere triumphos. 
Hie ver assiduum, atque alienis mensibus sestas ; 
Bis gravida? pecudes, bis pomis utilis arbor." 

" O my mother isle ! 
Needs must thou prove a name most dear and holy 
To me, a son, a brother, and a friend, 
A husband, and a father ! who revere 
All bonds of natural love, and find them all 
Within the limits of thy rocky shores. 
O native Britain ! O my mother isle ! 
How shouldst thou prove aught else but dear and 
holy 



EPIC POETRY. 33 

To me, who from thy lakes, and mountain-hills, 
Thy clouds, thy quiet dales, thy rocks, and seas 
Have drunk in all my intellectual life, 
All sweet sensations, all ennobling thoughts, 
All adoration of the God in nature, 
All lovely and all honorable things, 
Whatever makes this mortal spirit feel 
The joy and greatness of its future being ?" 

We cannot sympathize with that spirit of criticism, 
which censures modern poetry for being the por- 
traiture of individual characteristics and passions, 
and not the reflection of the general features of 
society and the outward man. If we want such 
poetry as Homer's, we must not only evoke him 
from the shades, but also his times. Purely object- 
ive poetry is the most perfect, and possesses the 
most interest, only in the childhood of the human 
mind. In the poetry of the Hindoos, of the Israelites, 
as well as of the Greeks, the epic is the prevailing 
element. But that page of the heroic character is* 
turned forever ; — another element is developing itself 
in the soul, and breathing into the materiality of the 
past a spiritual life and beauty. It is in vain wa 
echo the words of other days, and call it poetry ; it 
is in vain we collect the scattered dust of the past, 
and attempt to give it form and life by that same 
principle which once animated it. We can only 
3 



34 EPIC POETRY. 

give a brighter and more joyous existence to the 
cold forms of departed days, by bowing down, like 
the prophet of old, and breathing into them a purer 
and more ennobling faith, the brighter flame of our 
own bosoms. To stir the secret depths of our 
hearts, writers must have penetrated deeply into 
their own. Homer found conflicts without, to de- 
scribe ; shall the poets of our day be blamed because 
they would exhibit to us those they feel within? 
Milton gives us the philosophy of Christian epic 
poets, when he says, " that he who would not be 
frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in lauda- 
ble things, ought himself to be a true poem ; that is, 
a composition and pattern of the best and honorablest 
things ; not presuming to sing of high praises of 
heroic men or famous cities, unless he have in him- 
self the experience and practice of all that which is 
praiseworthy." What, indeed, are the writings of 
the great poets of our own times but epics ; the 
description of those internal conflicts, the interest in 
which has so far superseded those of the outward 
w r orld ? A sufficient answer to the charge of ego- 
tism and selfishness, to which they are exposed, is 
given in the words of Coleridge. " In the Paradise 
Lost, indeed in every one of his poems, it is Milton 
himself whom you see ; his Satan, his Adam, his 
Raphael, almost his Eve, are all John Milton ; and 
it is a sense of this intense egotism that gives me 



EPIC POETRY. 



the greatest pleasure in reading Milton's works. 
The egotism of such a man is a revelation of spirit." 
Lamartine, when he complains so often at not being 
1 able to give to the world an epic embodying the 
present development of the heroic character, seems 
not to have dreamed that, unless he could represent 
objectively the action of one mind on another, he 
was, by the expression of his feelings, giving us the 
only epic poem the mind in its present stage is capa- 
ble of giving. 

The truth of the principles, we have laid down t 
may be still farther tested by their application to 
the projected epic of Coleridge on the destruction 
of Jerusalem, of which he said that it " was the 
only subject now remaining for an epic poem, a 
subject which, like Milton's Fall of Man, should 
interest all Christendom, as the Homeric war of 
Troy interested all Greece." He farther observes, 
that " the subject with all its great capabilities has 
this one grand defect, that whereas a poem to be 
epic must have a personal interest in the destruction 
of Jerusalem, no genius or skill could possibly pre- 
serve the interest for the hero from being merged in 
the interest for the event." We will not touch upon 
other objections which he himself has urged, such 
as mythology and manners, to which what we have 
already said on other poems, will as well apply; 
but will only remark, that the subject itself is incapa- 



36 EPIC POETRY. 

ble of exhibiting the present development of the 
heroic character, and cannot therefore be made the 
great epic of this age, or of any to come. This 
may be seen from what has already been said. What 
made Milton's subject great, and what can now 
alone make any subject for epic interest great, was 
the action made visible of a superior intellect on an 
inferior. Could intellectual power be represented 
with the same objectiveness as physical power, there 
might be as many epics now as there are great 
minds. The reason is obvious. It is this manner 
of representing power which alone possesses a cor- 
responding interest with tragedy, by which alone 
there can be a hero capable of sustaining the inter- 
est. The poem of Coleridge, even if feasible, must 
have been more similar to Tasso's than Milton's, and 
consequently when compared with the latter, not 
great. 

Schiller's plan of an epic poem, founded on Fred- 
erick the Great of Prussia as the hero, must, if the 
principles advanced are correct, have proved far 
more futile than the one last mentioned ; and it 
strongly confirms, as we think, the remarks before 
made on the hostility of the dramatic to the epic 
interest, that two of the greatest poets of our age 
should each have schemed an epic, yet neither com- 
pleted one. 

Of such attempts at the epic, as Monti's in Italian, 



EPIC POETRY. 37 

and Pollok's in our own language, we will only say, 
that they are as much wanting in the spirit of an 
epic as in its true form, and that they are as remote 
from the merit of Dante, whom they have taken as 
their model, as near him in plan. Their poems 
resemble those Spanish epics which suddenly ap- 
peared in the reign of Philip the Second, the whole 
series of which were nothing but chronicles, and 
differed but little from histories. Of Wilkie, and a 
host of others, we might say as Giraldi Cinto said 
of Trissino, who employed twenty years on his 
u Italia Liberata," that they do but select the refuse 
from the gold of Homer, imitate his vices, and 
gather together all that which good judges would 
wish to be rid of, by which they show little wisdom. 
We have thus endeavored to show the inability of 
the human mind, at the present day, to represent 
objectively its own action on another mind, and that 
the power to do this could alone enable the poet to 
embody in his hero the present development of the 
heroic character, and give to his poem a universal 
interest. We rejoice at this inability ; it is the high_ 
privilege of our age, the greatest proof of the pro- 
gress of the soul, and of its approach to that state 
of being where its thought is action, its word power. 



SHAKSPEARE. 



It is pleasing to frequent the places from which 
the feet of those whom this world calls great have 
passed away, to see the same groves and streams 
that they saw, to hear the same sabbath bells, to 
linger beneath the roof under which they lived, and 
be shaded by the same tree which shaded them. It is 
pleasant, for it makes us, as it were, companions of 
their earthly presence ; — the same heaven is above 
us, and the same earth is beneath us, and we feel 
ourselves sharers, for a time, in the same earthly 
heritage. But for the soul this is not enough. We 
feel unsatisfied until we know ourselves akin even 
with that greatness which made the spots on which 
it rested hallowed ; and until, by our own lives, and 
by converse with the thoughts they have bequeathed 
us, we feel that union and relationship of the spirit 
which we seek. We may frequent the same shades, 



40 SHAKSPEARE. 

we may linger beside the same streams, the mind 
may be raised and improved by its intercourse with 
a superior mind, but we can never be at rest, at 
home with them, we can never really see the same 
heaven and the same earth, either that our fellow 
men or that the Father of our spirits beholds, until 
by our own life that perfect union and relationship 
has been consummated. With other writers, at our 
very first acquaintance with their thoughts, we recog- 
nise our relationship with the swiftness of intuition ; 
but who of us, however familiar he may have been 
with his writings, has yet caught a glance of Shaks- 
peare's self, so that he could in any way identify 
himself with him, and feel himself a sharer in his 
joys and sorrows, his motives and his life ? With 
views narrowed down to our own peculiar and selfish 
ends, we cannot well conceive, for we feel little 
within us that answers to a being like him — whose 
spirit seemed the antagonist of matter ; whose life 
was as various and all-embracing as nature's ; and 
in whom the individual seemed lost and blended 
with the universal. In him we have a gift not of a 
world of matter but one of mind ; — a spirit to whom 
time and place seemed not to adhere ; to whom all 
seasons were congenial ; the world a home ; who was 
related to us all in that which is most ourselves ; and 
whose life and character, the more we lay aside 
what in us is provincial and selfish, the more deeply 



SHAKSPEARE. 41 

shall we understand. In speaking of him and what 
he did as an exception to ordinary rules, we only 
confess our ignorance of the great law of his exist- 
ence. If he was natural, and by a common nature 
kindred with us, as we all confess, that ignorance, 
which only exists by our own sufferance, will clear 
up, as we lay aside all that is false and artificial in 
our characters, and Shakspeare and his creations 
will stand before us in the clear bright sun-light of 
our own consciousness. 

My object is to show, by an analysis of the char- 
acter of Shakspeare, that a desire of action was the 
ruling impulse of his mind ; and consequently a sense 
of existence its permanent state. That this condi- 
tion was natural ; not the result felt from a submis- 
sion of the will to it, but bearing the will along with 
it ; presenting the mind as phenomenal and uncon- 
scious, and almost as much a passive instrument as 
the material world. 

I shall thus be led to find excuse for much that 
has seemed impure in his writings, and to change 
that admiration which has hitherto regarded him as 
a man, into one which would look upon him and love 
him as the unconscious work of God. 

By doing this I shall show that there is a higher 
action than that we witness in him ; where the will 
has not been borne down and drawn along by the 
mind's own original impulse ; but, though capable 



42 SHAKSPEARE. 

of resistance, yields flexibly to all its natural move- 
ments, presenting that higher phenomenon which 
genius and revelation were meant to forward in all 
men, — conscious nature. 

Our view is not concerned, therefore, with those 
necessary motives which doubtless compelled Shaks- 
peare, like all of us, to provide a daily means of 
support. These are matters of external history. 
They are indeed prominent objects, often changing 
and giving a new direction to the current ; but they 
tell us not why it flows onward and will ever flow. 
It is not to the softer and more perishable parts of 
his massy mind, I would direct my attention ; but to 
those veins of a primitive formation, which, now that 
time- has loosened and removed all else, still stand 
out as the iron frame work of his being. We look 
upon such minds as Shakspeare's as exceptions, for 
wise purposes, to our common nature ; and as the 
single man who is born blind tells thousands that 
there is One who giveth them sight ; so those of our 
race, who by nature are so strongly prompted to will 
and to do that their minds seem almost as passive as 
matter beneath superior power, have been denied 
the liberty of will, as I think, that the many might 
be continually reminded that their minds were not 
their own, and that the conscious submission of their 
wills to the same great influence was their highest 
glory. All men will then exhibit, according to their 



SHAKSPEARE. 43 

gifts, that greatness and universality as conscious, 
which we now witness in them unconsciously shown ; 
their ruling motive will be a yielding to the hallowed 
impulses to action ; — the permanent state of their 
souls, eternal life. 

There is a desire of mental activity felt by such 
a mind as Shakspeare's corresponding with that im- 
pulse to physical action felt by all men. This must 
be a natural consequence of such mental endowment ; 
and the movements of the mind, in men like these, 
must as regularly take the lead of volition as the 
involuntary motions of the physical frame. Scott's 
confession on this point applies equally to all. " Peo- 
ple may say this and that of the pleasure of fame 
or of profit as a motive of writing : I think the only 
pleasure is in the actual exertion and research, and 
I would no more write upon any other terms than I 
would hunt merely to dine upon hare-soup. At the 
same time, if credit and profit came unlooked for, I 
would no more quarrel with them than with the 
soup." The main action of all such minds must 
evidently be as independent of the will as is the life 
in a plant or a tree ; and, as they are but different 
results of the same great vital energy in nature, we 
cannot but feel that the works of genius are as much 
a growth as are the productions of the material 
world. Such minds act as if all else but the sense 
of their existence was an accident ; and, under the 



44 SHAKSPEAKE. 

influence of this transforming power, all is plastic ; — 
marble becomes flexible and shapes itself into life ; 
words partake as it were of motion, form and speech ; 
and matter, like the atoms on the magnetic plate, 
feels instinct with order and design. The stream of 
life, — which, in other men, obstructed and at last sta- 
tionary as the objects that surround it, seems scarcely 
to deserve the name, — in them rolls ever onward its 
rich and life-giving waters as if unconscious of the 
beautiful banks it has overflowed with fertility. With 
most men it requires a continual effort of the will 
to prevent the objects which were only intended to 
give exercise to their souls from detaining them, as 
it were, and holding them in a torpid inanimation. 
As long as man labors for a physical existence, 
though an act of necessity almost, he is yet natural ; 
it is life, though that of this world, for which he 
instinctively works. But when he has reached this 
point where the means of physical existence are se- 
cured, he is permitted to become unnatural ; he is 
left at liberty to strive for that eternal life which is 
promised him, by the voluntary surrender and sacri- 
fice of the objects of this ; or to become at every 
moment more like the senseless clods around him, 
and, at last, when he has gained the whole world, 
instead of having sacrificed it all to that sense of 
life and love within him, he has lost his soul. It 
seems indeed a thing impossible to us, sunk as we are 



SHAKSPEARE. 45 

in sin and the flesh, that this vast globe and millions 
of others should roll on their limitless ways with the 
speed of thought, moved but by a will kindred with 
our own. But would we take our just position in 
regard to the objects of sense ; and, instead of find- 
ing ourselves revolving around them, did they seem 
like harmonized spheres enlightened and moved by 
the strong working principles of duty and love within 
us, we should then indeed feel of a truth our rela- 
tionship to our Father, and that for matter to obey 
His will was but its natural law. Do we wonder 
then, that, as this momentary petrifaction of the 
heart goes on, we are every day more and more 
strangers in this world of love, holding no com- 
munion with the Universal Parent, and hoarding up 
instead of distributing His general gifts ? As we 
resist this process, the resulting state must evidently 
be one with which we may interpret the mind of 
Shakspeare, — a sense of eternal life, an activity 
communicated to all else, and not merely one com- 
municated to us from without ; we are no longer the 
{ servants of sin, but the free followers of Christ. 

As, therefore, the activity of the mind, freed by 
an exertion of the will, must ever be connected with 
the sense of eternal life, so is there joined with the 
mind's involuntary freedom a sense of existence 
that constitutes its innocent happiness, and makes it 
the natural teacher to us of the wide principle which 



46 SHAKSPEARE. 

is its mission. In Claudio's reflections on death, the 
poet unconsciously lays bare the texture of his own 
mind. Claudio regrets not, as we should suppose he 
would, the loss of his sister, or the good things of 
this world, nor feels a doubt of another ; but all his 
horrors are but the negations of these two great 
characteristics of Shakspeare's own mind, — the bar- 
ring up of his varied activity, and the losing in a 
kneaded clod of the sensible warm motion of life. 

" Ay, but to die, and go we know not where ; 
To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot ; 
This sensible warm motion to become 
A kneaded clod ; and the delighted spirit 
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside 
In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice ; 
To be imprisoned in the viewless winds, 
And blown with restless violence round about 
The pendent world ; or to be worse than worst 
Of those that lawless and uncertain thoughts 
Imagine howling ! — 'tis too horrible ! 
The weariest and most loathed worldly life, 
That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment 
Can lay on nature, is a paradise 
To what we fear of death." 

And again, in Clarence's dream of death, so strongly 
is the resistance of the soul to this imprisoning of it 



SHAKSPEARE. 47 

expressed, that we feel a sense of suffocation in 

reading it. 

" Often did I strive 
To yield the ghost : but still the envious flood 
Kept in my soul, and would not let it forth 
To seek the empty, vast, and wand'ring air ; 
But smother' d it within my panting bulk, 
Which almost burst to belch it in the sea." 

The play of Hamlet is founded on these two char- 
acteristics, and they are apparent throughout ; as we 
shall endeavor to show by a separate analysis of it. 
We are continually hearing the poet himself speak- 
ing out through the words of Hamlet. As we be- 
come more and more conscious of that state of mind 
which our Savior calls eternal life, we shall the bet- 
ter understand the natural superiority of such a mind 
as Shakspeare's to the narrowing influences which 
we have to resist, but which his involuntary activity 
rendered powerless. That a sense of life would be 
the accompaniment of this activity would then be 
apparent ; for how could that childlike love of vari- 
ety and joyous sympathy with all things exist, save 
from that simple happiness which in him ever flowed 
from the consciousness of being, but which, alas, by 
most of us is known but in youth ? Between the 
dignified and trivial, between decay and bloom, how 
else could he have felt that connecting link, of which 



48 SHAKSPEARE. 

we are insensible, enabling him to present them all 
united as in the moving panorama that encircles us. 
This life of his in all objects and scenes was the 
simple result of the movements of a mind which 
found only in all it saw around it, something to cor- 
respond with its own condition. Its own activity was 
its possession ; circumstances and things seemed to 
be, because it was ; these were accidents, and not, as 
with other men, realities. His power while exerted 
on every thing seems independent of its objects. 
Like the ocean, his mind could fill with murmuring 
waves the strangely indented coast of human exist- 
ence from the widest bay to the smallest creek ; then 
ebbing, retire within itself, as if form was but a mode 
of its limitless and independent being. Did love 
succeed necessity, we should need no other explana- 
tion of such a mind than our own would give us. 
We all feel at first that the life is more than the 
meat, but from the corrupt world around us we soon 
learn to prize the meat more than our spiritual life. 
We learn indeed, while children, the fallacy of sac- 
rificing our physical existence to any thing inferior, 
and to look upon it as that to which all other ends 
are to be made subservient ; but we grow up and 
grow old without ever discerning a far more cunning 
fallacy for which the other was but a preparatory 
step, and we live on, merging the thought of our 
being in its daily accidents, and immolating the life 



SHAKSPEARE. 49 

the spirit before the idol of its desires. Instead 
of this, we should be quickening by our daily life 
that spiritual consciousness which otherwise, in the 
hour of death, we shall feel that we have lost ; when 
the eye that saw, and the ear that heard, have done 
their tasks ; when the heavens which that eye has so 
long gazed upon are rolling together as a scroll, and 
the thousand tones of music which the ear has drank 
from the earth are hushed, and the affrighted soul 
turns inward upon itself as the sole remaining mon- 
ument of all that was once real. Was such a con- 
sciousness ours, then indeed might we sympathize 
with Shakspeare ; then might the lofty thought which 
Milton felt in his blindness and age, forever permeate 
our being, and lift us to that height from which, like 
him, we could look down on the world and the ob- 
jects of sense beneath ; and as we gazed w T ith the 
soul's pure eyes, and a mind irradiated with that 
celestial light for which he prayed, we too might 
exclaim 

" For who would lose, 
Though full of pain, this intellectual being, 
These thoughts that wander through eternity, 
To perish rather swallowed up and lost 
In the wide womb of uncreated night, 
Devoid of sense and motion?" 

This activity of mind in Shakspeare, to which the 
4 



50 SHAKSPEARE. 

theatre perhaps in some measure gave a direction, 
and the strong sense of life which must necessarily 
have accompanied it, leads us to the negation of the 
two, as the idea on which his mind would dwell most 
frequently and with the most concern. We find 
this thought therefore standing out more or less 
prominently throughout all his plays, and forming, 
as I have before said, the ground-plan of Hamlet. 
I cannot help quoting in this connection a passage 
from " As You Like It," which only Shakspeare 
could have written. The words are so simple that 
a fool might have uttered them, though only the 
wisest of men knew it. Yet none could impress 
upon us more strongly the fact that we live, and 
that 

" All that live must die 
Passing through nature to eternity." 
"A fool, a fool! — 1 met a fool i' the forest, 
A motley fool ; — a miserable world ! — 
As I do live by food, I met a fool ; 
Who laid him down and bask'd him in the sun, 
And railed on lady Fortune in good terms, 
In good set terms, — and yet a motley fooL 
Good-morrow, fool, quoth I : No, sir, quoth he, 
Call me not fool, till heaven hath sent me fortune : 
And then he drew a dial from his poke ; 
And looking on it with lack-lustre eye 
Says, very wisely, It is ten o'clock : 



SHAKSPEARE. 51 

Thus may we see, quoth he, how the world wags : 
'Tis but an hour ago, since it was nine ; 
And after an hour more, 'twill be eleven ; 
And so from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe, 
And then, from hour to hour, we rot, and rot, 
And thereby hangs a tale." 

These feelings caused Shakspeare to live beyond the 
influence of fame, and, though disturbed, as we have 
shown, by the thought of where or how he might 
exist in another world, he still felt the fact ; and 
fame can only be a motive to those who have no 
practical belief in the next world, or to whom it is 
an uncertainty. With the celebrated minds of anti- 
quity, this was the case ; and they found in the 
thought of fame some consolation for that activity 
and sense of life which they felt to be their great 
attributes, as if, that living tongues should tell of their 
existence, was nearest to life itself. Think not that 
it is for the paltry praise of others, that such have 
lived and suffered ; believe it not, even though they 
themselves knew not the spirit they were of, and in 
their ignorance believed it ; no — it could not be ; — - 
it was the promptings of an immortal nature that 
urged them to live, — to live, though it were to be but 
a thought in the memory of others. In this yearning 
of the spirit for being, for immortality, is seen a sign 
of its relationship to God ; that it is in very deed the 



52 SHAKSPEAKE. 

child of the great I am, and that in these its aspi- 
rations it calls Him Father. And as age on age 
rolls by, and we learn more humbly to bow to him 
who came to bring life and immortality to light, we 
shall feel more the truth of that sublime revelation 
which God early made of himself to his children, 
when he said to Moses, I Am that I Am. 

From what has been said we may perceive that 
universality is not the gift of Shakspeare alone, but 
natural to the mind of man ; and that whenever we 
unburthen ourselves of that load of selfishness under 
which what is natural in us lies distorted, it will 
resume as its own estate that diversity of being in 
which he delighted. That which in the poet, the 
philosopher, or the warrior, therefore affects us, 
is this higher natural action of the mind, which, 
though exhibited in one, is felt to be harmonious 
with all ; which imparts to us, as it were, their own 
universality, and makes us for a while companions of 
their various life. In the individual act we feel more 
than that which suffices for this alone ; we feel sen- 
sible that the blood that is filling one vein, and be- 
coming visible to us in one form, possesses a vitality 
of which every limb and the whole body are alone 
the fit expression. This natural action of the mind 
is ever revealing to us more than we have before 
known in whatever direction applied, for this alone 
unconsciously moves in its appointed path ; the only 



SHAKSPEARE. 53 

human actor in the drama of existence, save him 
who is by duty becoming consciously natural, that 
can show us any good. In its equable and uninter- 
rupted movements, it harmonizes ever with nature, 
giving the spiritual interpretation to her silent and 
sublime growth. In the movements of Shakspeare's 
mind, we are permitted to see an explanation of that 
strange phenomenon in the government of Him who 
made us, by which that which is most universal ap- 
pears to be coincident with that which is most par- 
ticular. In him we see how it is that the mighty 
laws which bind system upon system should be the 
same that stoop to order with exactest precision the 
particles whose minuteness escapes our vision ; that 
could we but feel aright, we should see that the same 
principle which teaches us to love ourselves, could not 
but lead us to love our neighbors as ourselves ; that 
did we love in ourselves what was truly worthy of 
our love, there would be no object throughout the 
wide circle of being, whose lot and happiness would 
not be our own. It is thus by becoming most uni- 
versal, we at the same time become most individual ; 
for they are not opposed to each other, but different 
faces of the same thing. But selfishness is the 
farthest removed of all things from the universality 
of genius or of goodness. For as the superiority to 
the objects of sense which the soul naturally has, 
and which, when lost, love would restore, diminishes ; 



54 



SHAKSPEARE. 



these senseless objects in their turn become masters ; 
we are the servants of sin, bowing to an idol that 
our own hands have set up, and sweating beneath 
the burthens of a despot strong in our own trans- 
ferred power. Like the ancients we too find a deity 
in each of the objects we pursue ; — we follow wealth 
till we worship Mammon ; love, till we see a Venus ; 
are ambitious, till our hands are stained with the 
bloody rites of Mars. While in the physical world 
we are waging by our rail-roads and engines a war 
of utter extermination against time and space, we 
forget that it is these very things, as motives, that 
urge us on. We are exhibiting the folly of kingdoms 
divided against themselves ; for, while in the physi- 
cal world we are driving to annihilation space and 
time, it is for the very sake of the things of time 
and sense that we do it. We are thereby excluding 
ourselves daily from those many mansions which 
Christ has taught are prepared for us. Our words 
confess that all things are God's, while our hands are 
busy in fencing off some corner of the wide universe 
from which to exclude our brother man. 

In the exceptions of our race, in those we have 
been accustomed to call great, we see universality 
claimed for them in their minds' own inborn and 
free-working energies. But others are more free 
agents, that they may not act unconsciously ; and 
that a conscious natural action when attained may 



SHAKSPEARE. 55 

be the eternal reward of their well doing. The 
mind which of its own inborn force is natural, is 
innocent ; but that which has been permitted to be- 
come so, is virtuous. True virtue would be con- 
scious genius. To minds in both of these states 
does universality belong ; in the one, it is that of the 
child ; in the other, that of manhood. Both are in 
harmony with nature. In the language of our Lord, 
they are little children learning to repeat the words 
they hear the Father utter. It was the same Father 
that fashioned him who wears a crown, and the 
shaggy monarch of the forest, who could alone give 
the corresponding state in the mind of a Shakspeare ; 
which enabled him to be with the ease and natural- 
ness of a Proteus, now " every inch a king," and 
now to be the lion too, and " roar so as to do any man's 
heart good to hear him ; so that the Duke would say 
' let him roar again, let him roar again.' " As the 
spontaneous action of Shakspeare's mind was con- 
tinually finding an answering expression in the world 
around it, so must the same action in us, when re- 
stored by love, find the same ever-varied forms. We 
shall become all things to all men. As the wind 
bloweth where it listeth, and we hear the sound 
thereof, but cannot tell whence it cometh and whither 
it goeth, so passive will the breath of life that God first 
breathed into us become to his holy will. Life will 
be a continued worship, for every object will be a 



56 SHAKSPEARE. 

gift, and every gift an opportunity for love. When 
all men shall so live and speak, their souls will have 
consciously become the passive instruments of the 
Divine will ; and will ever tell, in pure and spiritual 
worship to each other, the works and ways of a 
common Father. The highest exercise of the hu- 
man will, will be formed in its assent to the Divine. 
Genius will be the obedience of the child ; virtue, 
the obedience of the man to the same t Universal 
Parent. The unconscious utterings of our poet will 
be found verified in himself. 

" He that of greatest works is finisher, 
Oft does them by the weakest minister : 
So holy writ in babes hath judgment shown, 
When judges have been babes. Great floods have 

flown 
From simple sources ; and great seas have dried 
When miracles have by the greatest been denied. 
But most it is presumption in us, when 
The help of heaven we count the acts of men." 

So difficult is it therefore for us to forget ourselves, 
and to take our neighbor's situation with the same 
readiness that we hold our own, that we wonder very 
much at what we call Shakspeare's universality, his 
power of adapting himself to his characters ; and 
that we see nothing of himself in them. The diffi- 



SHAKSPEARE. 57 

culty that we imagine, and the want of perception 
of the poet in his characters, are both a difficulty 
and a want of our own making. Living, as we do, as 
if we were made for the objects around us, and not 
they for us, we are incapacitated for understanding 
or seeing as an individual, one to whom no such in- 
dividuality as we are conversant with belongs. We 
are looking for one like ourselves, to whom we may 
give a local habitation and a name ; whom we may 
call a lover of wealth, or pleasure, or fame, and forget 
that to him, whom we seek, places and names were 
but toys. We see not nor understand that each of 
the characters we read is the poet's, and that while 
there, he neither wishes to be, nor is elsewhere. We 
cannot better picture to our minds the dramatic state 
of Shakspeare's, than by recalling to our thoughts 
the days of our childhood, before we had been 
schooled by the selfishness of sin, when the tides of 
life flowed on with no will but His who was pouring 
them through our souls. Then was it, as has been 
said, that man " filled nature with his overflowing 
currents." Could we deny the false pride which 
springs from the exercise of our own wills, could 
we submit them in humbleness to Him in whom we 
should live and move and have our being, we should 
still feel in manhood and age that our's was that 
universal life and love, the emblem of which our 
Saviour beheld in a little child, and said " of such is 



58 SHAKSPEARE. 

the kingdom of heaven." This period in youth we 
' call natural ; all that the child does bears the im- 
press of universal life ; like Adam, he is uncon- 
sciously the lord of creation ; he is content with liv- 
ing ; his happiness has not yet become the selfish 
love of possession ; his actions and thoughts are full 
of life unclaimed save by Him who gave it. Like 
the Greek, the past and future tenses are with him 
present ; he is what he describes, and his gestures 
mark actions as if he saw them and was pointing 
them out in the vacuity. To Shakspeare's whole 
life we might apply the same language that we do 
in speaking of the frolics of a child, — how full he is 
of life ! — this is that which is most apparent in his 
every character. The stronger this activity, the more 
happiness is there in the mind's own exercise, the 
more is it independent of the particular object on 
which its power is exerted, and the more coincident 
is it with all forms of being. In every actor in the 
mighty drama of human existence, did Shakspeare 
find himself; he wished to live and move, and this 
was Shakspeare. He was rich, he was poor, he 
was wise, he was foolish, he was mad, he was sober, 
" desiring this man's art and that man's scope," each 
and all, yet neither. He lived as each character, 
yet was not that which at any one time appeared, 
since that which is individual can only be a face of 
the universal. In each, he might say, with Iago, " I 



SHAKSPEARE. 59 

am not that I am." I cannot farther illustrate this 
childlike action of his mind better than by applying 
to him what Wordsworth has said of a child. 

" Behold the child among his new-born blisses, 
A six years' Darling of a pigmy size ! 
See, where 'mid work of his own hand he lies, 
Fretted by sallies of his mother's kisses, 
With light upon him from his father's eyes, 
See at his feet some little plan or chart, 
Some fragment from his dream of human life 
Shaped by himself with newly-learned art ; 
A wedding or a festival, 
A mourning or a funeral ; 

And this hath now his heart, 
And unto this he frames his song ; 
Then will he fit his tongue 
To dialogues of business, love, or strife, 
But it will not be long 
Ere this be thrown aside, 
And with new joy and pride 
The little actor cons another part, 
Filling from time to time his " humorous stage" 
With all the Persons down to palsied age, 
That Life brings with her in her equipage ; 
As if his whole vocation 
Were endless imitation." 



60 SHAKSPEARE. 

In this activity of mind, then, in this childlike 
superiority to the objects by which it was attracted, 
we find Shakspeare. This was his genius, for genius 
is nothing but this natural action of the mind ren- 
dering obedient to itself by a higher principle those 
objects to whose power it might otherwise have been 
subjected. This it was that enabled him like a boy 
14 to toss creation like a bauble from hand to hand, 
embodying in turn each capricious shade of thought." 
Thus it was, that, while others were making ends of 
things, he gave to them their deeper significance of 
life and death, of time, and eternity. In this view, 
the acts of Shakspeare seem but natural movements. 
With the ever-surprised mind of a child, he was 
always transformed into the object he saw. This 
condition of mind might perhaps be designated as 
an impersonal one, so strongly is it always possessed 
by that which is before it, as to seem for the time to 
have no other individuality. It is the unconscious 
possessor of all things, and, like the mythological 
Greek, gives personality and voice even to the objects 
of inanimate creation. This is that primaeval state 
of innocence from which we have fallen. We are 
no longer carried out of ourselves to become the 
expression of that which is around us ; but enchained 
by our own wills, the cloud and the flower speak 
only through our dictation. Would we attain to the 
recognition of the individuality of a Shakspeare or 



SHAKSPEARE. 61 

a Homer, (for they had an individuality and one 
which it shames us not to perceive,) it can only be 
by being born again, by becoming again through 
obedience as little children, and by feeling more 
fully than we have yet done the meaning of that 
sublime declaration of our Lord's, " all that the 
Father hath is mine." 

As we arrive in our own consciousness at a truer 
perception of what Shakspeare was, we shall start 
with strange wonder to see how far we have strayed 
from the paths of our youth, how much we have 
substituted calculation for right, selfishness for love. 
We shall then be surprised that we ever sought for 
him apart from his creations, and learn that the per- 
fect poet is never visible save in action, in the ever new, 
ever changing aspect of nature and of man. Truth 
and time are separate rays only when seen through 
the medium of an imperfect act ; but through the 
perfect and entire action of the mind they are seen 
blended in the life as primary colors in the common 
light of day. 

This view of Shakspeare will lead us to look upon 
his characters as the natural expression of his own, 
as its necessary growths or offshoots. We shall then 
see a reason for their being as they actually appear 
to be facts, real events ; which you could no more 
alter or improve, than you can the branch of a tree, 
or the visible realities themselves. Such being the 



62 SHAKSPEARE. 



foundations on which his characters rest, we may see 
why it is that they stand in the front of mental 
achievements ; and that we speak and think of them 
as those with whom we are acquainted, whom we 
have seen and addressed. " We talk," says Charles 
Lamb, " of Shakspeare's admirable observation of 
life, when we should feel that not from a petty inqui- 
sition into those cheap and every-day characters 
which surrounded him as they surround us ; but 
from his own mind, which was, to borrow a phrase 
of Ben Jonson's, the very " sphere of humanity," 
he fetched those images of virtue and of knowledge, 
of which every one of us recognising a part, think 
we comprehend in our natures the whole, and often- 
times mistake the powers which he positively creates 
in us for nothing more than indigenous faculties of 
our own minds, which only wanted the application 
of corresponding virtues in him to return a full and 
clear echo of the same." We may study a char- 
acter, notice its incomings and its outgoings, and, 
having become perfectly acquainted with the whole 
whereabout of its life, may place it in a given situation, 
and put the words that it would be sure to utter in 
its mouth ; and, after all, it would be no more like the 
breathing life of one of Shakspeare's characters than 
the merest wire -strung automaton. Such a form has 
no counterpart in creation ; it is as dead as the soul 
that made it. We have, it may be, copied with 



SHAKSPEARE. 63 

weary finger and wisest head the mere letter of life, 
but our hearts have been far from the task ; and 
the mental abortion will go but to increase the 
number of those " gorgons, hydras and chimeras 
dire" with which the fruitful loins of the press over- 
teem. Each of the characters that Shakspeare has 
left us, on the contrary, was his own ; the impulse 
by which he moved was so universal that it rendered 
his being coincident with that of all. He actually 
lived what he represented. We cannot speak of 
him as breaking away from his own egotism and 
throwing himself into his characters ; he had no ego- 
tism other than that which would arise from that 
childlike state of mind, which robes itself in no 
particular shape, but in all shapes. For him every- 
thing lives and moves. For him, as for those of our 
race who spoke the early Shemitic language, there 
were no neuter nouns. 

" I am the sea ; hark, how her sighs do blow ! 
She is the weeping welkin, I the earth : 
Then must my sea be moved with her sighs ; 
Then must my earth with her continual tears 
Become a deluge, overflowed and drowned." 

It may seem strange that a mind capable of the 
conception, as we call it, of a Hamlet or a Lear 
should yet seem to delight in those apparently so 



64 SHAKSPEARE. 

opposite, — in characters of a low or even licentious 
cast. But this apparent inconsistency admits of an 
easy explanation from the very nature of that mind's 
action. To us indeed they seem antipodes ; but to 
him they stood embraced by the same horizon of 
life and action. If we will but think of his mind as 
moved by the same desire of action as our own 
limbs are in childhood, and with as little end in view 
save that of its own activity ; we shall then easily 
conceive why he should seek to identify himself 
with every mode of life, and be and act characters 
of the most apparently opposite nature. That such 
was the impulse under which they were written, we 
can only appeal to each one's consciousness in read- 
ing for a proof. He delighted in all men of high 
as well as low estate, — we had almost said, in the 
licentious as in the virtuous. But how different is 
that playful and childlike spirit with which he acted 
a vicious character, from that which seems to have 
actuated a Byron. The one represents an aban- 
doned man as he actually exists, with the joys of 
sense and the anguish of the spirit alternately agitat- 
ing his troubled breast; and the contemplation of 
such a character, if it does not make us as good as 
it might have done, had he drawn it with higher 
motives, will yet make us better, as the sight of it 
does in actual life. But the latter was not innocent, 
he imparted something of himself to what he de- 



SHAKSPEARE. 65 

scribes ; he would not and could not, like Shakspeare, 
put before us a virtuous man with the same pleasure 
as he does a vicious one ; he has not, like him, held a 
pure and untarnished mirror up to nature, but reflected 
her back upon us from his own discolored and pas- 
sion stained bosom. 

Shakspeare acted like his own FalstafF " on in- 
stinct" ; no ligament save that of existence bound 
him to any particular mode of action. We cannot 
therefore learn the moral influence which his writings 
have had upon society, and the effect of this or that 
character or passage from what seem to us their 
consequences, unless, at the same time, we are con- 
scious of the state of mind from which they pro- 
ceeded. There may have been a deeper instinct or 
principle, at work in the poet's mind by which those 
very consequences we blame were fashioned to be 
the instruments of good. Of this we can learn only 
by our lives. The rugged summits of virtue alone 
command the prospect over the plains of innocence ; 
and true manhood can alone interpret the sports of 
the child. It is from this central position only that 
we may hope to trace aright the orbit of his influ- 
ence and the moral tendency of his writings. He 
lived in thought as we live in sense ; what the invol- 
untary movements of our bodies are to us, the action 
of his mind was to him ; and as it darted " from 
heaven to earth, from earth to heaven," the wide 
5 



66 SHAKSPEARE. 

world seemed but the green play-ground of his 
youth, and our long years of life a summer's day. 
This difference is well shown by the choruses of 
acts third and fifth in King Henry V. 

" Thus, with imagined wing, our swift scene flies, 
In motion of no less celerity 
Than that of thought. Suppose that you have seen 
The well-appointed king at Hampton pier 
Embark his royalty ; and his brave fleet 
With silken streamers the young Phcebus fanning, 
Play with your fancies ; and in them behold, 
Upon the hempen tackle, ship-boys climbing : 
Hear the shrill whistle, which doth order give 
To sounds confused : behold the threaden sails, 
Borne with the invisible and creeping wind, 
Draw the huge bottoms through the furrowed sea, 
Breasting the lofty surge : O, do but think, 
You stand upon the rivage, and behold 
A city on the inconstant billows dancing ; 
For so appears this fleet majestical, 
Holding due course to Harfleur. Follow, follow ! 
Grapple your minds to sternage of this navy ; 
And leave your England as dead midnight still, 
Guarded with grandsires, babies and old women, 
Either past, or not arrived to, pith and puissance : 
For who is he, whose chin is but enriched 
With one appearing hair, that will not follow 



SHAKSPEARE. 67 

These culled and choice-drawn cavaliers to 

France ? 
Work, work, your thoughts, and therein see a siege I 
Behold the ordnance on their carriages, 
With fatal mouths gaping on girded Harfleur. 
Suppose the ambassador from the French comes 

back; 
Tells Harry — that the king doth offer him 
Katharine his daughter ; and with her, to dowry, 
Some petty and unprofitable dukedom ; 
The offer likes not : and the nimble gunner, 
With linstock now the devilish cannon touches, 
And down goes all before him. Still be kind, 
And eke out our performance ivith your mind" 

Act 3d. 
His mental life was as much a matter of impulse as 
the restless activity of our youth. Other poets we 
blame or praise, but Shakspeare only elicits our 
wonder. He spent his life in living in thought the 
lives of others. What he was and felt he said, and 
it was nature and truth ; for acting from impulse he 
did not strive to build up character, according to his 
own presumption, and preconceived notions, but only 
described, as I have said, what he himself was and 
felt in their positions as he severally occupied them. 
He did not, like Corneille, hold back vice that she 
might not speak her part, nor did he, like Byron, re- 
strain virtue. No actor in life is driven from his 



68 SHAKSPEARE. 

stage, and the consequence is, that, although he acted 
neither from a good or bad motive but only from 
instinct, he has produced for us, " in his quick forge 
and working-house of thought," a natural mental 
growth of those very events by which God in their 
ordinary course is teaching us ; and which, by the 
action of his mind, he has again presented us for 
warning and pleasure abridged of their " huge and 
proper life.'" 

The true influence of his characters as individuals 
and even as groups, then, is, that by them we are 
continually reminded of his own, of what we may 
call the impersonal state of childhood, a state which 
we have all known, yet from which we have all 
fallen ; that condition of innocence in which lived 
our first parents, when all things were gifts, and they 
were one with them ; for they were each the offer- 
ing of Infinite Love. We do not look upon Shak- 
speare as purposing this or any other effect ; but 
consider it as the unconscious influence of one ever 
active in the mental life of which we have spoken, 
and of which the words he has left us were but the 
natural acompaniment. We can impart but what 
we are, and Shakspeare formed no exception to that 
which binds all other men. As we converse with 
him, at every turn, in each of the varied forms under 
which he presents himself, we are ever wondering 
at and groping after that strange individuality from 



SHAKSPEARE. 69 

which they all proceed. This attained, we shall 
read the riddle of his character, and stand surprised 
within ourselves at the simplicity of the solution. 

We look in vain therefore in Shakspeare for that 
consciousness of the unconquerable will that we find 
in Milton. Shakspeare could never have given us a 
character like Satan's. He has indeed made us feel 
in. the impulses of our nature a depth and strength 
of which before we had scarcely any conception. 
The whispers of conscience and the prompting* of 
natural affection seem at times to speak with almost 
supernatural power ; and call upon the selfish and 
sin-stricken soul in tones that bear us back, as it were, 
to that mysterious moment, when the springs of our 
being were unsealed, and we hear again the streams 
of its murmuring life gushing from out their fountains. 
Thus when the thought that so her father looked, 
flashes across the murderous mind of Lady Mac- 
beth, as she sees the gray locks and venerable face 
of the sleeping Duncan; it seems as if we saw the 
dark pall of clouds that have gathered with more 
than midnight blackness, over her devoted head, rent 
for an instant asunder, disclosing to her guilty soul, 
but one moment and the last, the blue bright heaven of 
her childhood's thoughts. But the wickedness of such 
an one as Lady Macbeth, and even Iago, we can pity 
and pardon ; for we feel that under happier influen- 
ces their nature would have been changed ; it is the 



70 SHAKSPEARE. 

first sin of Adam, and not the full-grown conscious 
guilt of his tempter. Shakspeare represents man 
as he is; too weak to contend by his own unaided 
strength against the destroyer of our own race, una- 
ble of himself to find the way, the truth, and the 
light, yet needing their continual guidance. In Mac- 
beth, the struggle for victory is still kept up, the fight 
is far from being ended, and the night is still on the 
approach ; — but with Iago, it is past ; the shadows have 
long since fallen over the field of his defeat ; as we 
try to retrace its past history, all is indefinite, and the 
imagination fills its unknown extent with sights more 
terrific than any actual conflict could have presented m r 
every object swells into unreal proportions, and at 
every step the night thickens with horrors around us. 
In his character we seem to see the conquest of sin 
complete, and the bondage of the spirit consumma- 
ted ; a state the more dreadful to our view since the 
dark field of conflict is hidden by the past ; and we 
see the slave of sin sunk even below the remem- 
brance of his freedom, and rejoicing in iniquity as if 
it was his natural heritage. But with Satan there is 
no joy in iniquity, he ever feels 

" How awful goodness is, and sees 
Virtue in her shape how lovely ; sees and pines 
His loss*" 



SHAKSPEARE. 71 

Ever in his bosom gnaws the worm that dieth not; 
ever burns the fire that is not quenched. His is that 
sin unto death, for which we may not pray. It had 
been in vain had the very light of heaven shone around 
the darkness of the archangel ; and we look with hate 
upon his gigantic iniquity, as upon a daemon more than 
human ; for whom there remains no place for repent- 
ance, and for whom is reserved the blackness of 
darkness forever. 

Since Shakspeare accomplished so great results 
without any apparent object, and since the strains of 
the bard are ever so welcome to the general ear ; it 
has been inferred that his motive was to please. But 
that poetry gives pleasure, is a consequence of its be- 
ing written, not the motive for it. We degrade those 
whom the world has pronounced poets, when we as- 
sume any other cause of their song than the divine 
and original action of the soul in humble obedience 
to the Holy Spirit upon whom they call. Wherever 
this action is, it is its own cause for being heard ; for 
it is the word of God uttered through the soul as it 
ever speaks through inanimate creation. Homer 
and Shakspeare were without a struggle the natural 
representatives of this action ; and they were a uni- 
versal expression through which all things might ut- \ 
ter themselves. They were the innocent and uncon- 
scious children of duty, and in the ode of Words- 
worth, we read of them ; 



72 SHAKSPEARE. 

" There are who ask not if thine eye 
Be on them ; who, in love and truth 
Where no misgiving is, rely 
Upon the genial sense of youth : 
Glad Hearts ! without reproach or blot ; 
Who do thy work, and know it not : 
Long may the kindly impulse last ! 
But thou, if they should totter, teach them to stand 
fast I" 

Such minds, as we have before said, seem to be ex- 
ceptions, for wise purposes, to the rest of our race ; 
exhibiting to all the natural features of the soul in 
the unconscious and childlike state of innocence. 
The world is theirs, but it is so only because they 
are innocent ; and they describe it as if it had never 
known sin. In Wordsworth and Milton, on the con- 
trary, we see the struggle of the child to become the 
perfect man in Christ Jesus. Their constant prayer 
is, " not my will, Father, but thine be done." They 
are striving for that silence in their own bosoms that 
shall make the voice that created all things heard. 
It is the self which opposes this, that they feel with- 
in them and see without them ; and it is this alone r 
under whatsoever forms it may be, that they describe .. 
They use not others' lips and words, because they 
are their own, but only in the place of their own ; and 
the language which their characters utter is not the 



SHAKSPEARE. 73 

varying personality of a Shakspeare, but the trans- 
feree! one of a single-sided individuality. Like the 
fallen angel they cannot escape the consciousness of 
themselves, and the brightness of poesy, instead of 
blazing directly down upon their heads, causes them 
from the obliqueness of its rays to be ever accompa- 
nied by their own shadow. But when the war of 
self which these and other bards have so nobly main- 
tained shall have ceased, and the will of the Father 
shall be done on earth as it is in heaven ; when man 
shall have come to love his neighbor as himself; 
then shall the poet again find himself speaking with 
many tongues ; and the expectant nations shall listen 
surprised to a note more sublime, yet accordant with 
the rolling numbers of the Chian minstrel, and more 
sweet than the wild warblings of the bard of Avon. 
To the soul with whom striving has ceased, shall re- 
turn that peace which makes all that God hath to be 
ours. It shall speak in all the utterances of joy and 
grief; and their full and perfect voice, which in- 
nocence has failed to express, shall rise from the 
deep bosom of its spiritual love. Virtue shall find 
in genius her erring, though innocent child ; and 
genius shall follow in love her maternal guidance. 
The few that have appeared first shall then seem 
last ; and the last shall be seen to be first. Each 
soul shall show in its varied action the beauty and 



74 SHAKSPEARE. 

grandeur of nature ; and shall live forever a teacher 
of the words it hears from the Father. 

Shakspeare's life, as we have endeavored to show, 
was coincident with that of others, from the natural 
action of his mind ; and from its unreserved yield- 
ing to events it has exhibited them to us more as they 
are than any other mind has yet done. But a more 
perfect coincidence, which shall exhibit more of 
what man is than he has done, can only be brought 
about by feeling more deeply that all things are ours, 
and by possessing more of that love which knew 
what was in man. Had this, and a sense of duty 
been Shakspeare's, they would have rendered more 
powerful and affecting the influence of his charac- 
ters without making them in any degree less natural. 
But it may be asked, should the poet be more moral 
than Providence ; if he exhibit things as they are, will 
they not have all the influence that God intended 
they should have ? It is that the poet should repre- 
sent things as they are, for which we contend. We 
are not pleading for those sickly beings who, by the 
handy work of the mind, are made to fit any pre- 
scribed pattern of goodness ; but for those who live 
and move about us ; to describe the height and depth 
of whose thoughts and passions, and interpret their 
meaning, hidden it may be from themselves, even 
such a mind as Shakspeare's must have entered into 
and portrayed characters not only from impulse, but 



SHAKSPEARE. 75 

also with a love whose strength was that of duty. 
Too easily might we else, as he has sometimes done, 
quicken with our life the dry bones of moral death 
around us. It is no common lamp that will enable 
us to thread securely the dark and labyrinthine cav- 
erns of sin, to shed that light even amid its damp 
and fatal vapors that will enable us to draw from 
their lowest depths the rich treasures of wisdom 
which they hide. No one can enter more entirely 
into the lives of others than Shakspeare has done, 
until he has laid down his own life, and gone forth 
to seek and to save that which is lost. Our more 
perfect views were not intended to be the substitutes 
for, but the interpreters of the characters of others. 
What ought to be, if we describe it by itself, be- 
comes but our own teaching; what is, if we look 
upon it with a spirit more nearly allied to His who 
sees all things as they are, will prove the lessons not 
of our own insignificance, but of His providence. 
We need not substitute our ideals of virtue and vice 
for the living forms around us ; we need not brighten 
the one, nor darken the other; to the spiritual eye, 
even here, will the just begin to appear as angels of 
light ; and as the sun of Divine Favor sets on the 
wicked, their lengthening shadows, even here, are 
seen to blacken and dilate into more gigantic and aw- 
ful proportions. Shakspeare's characters are true 
and natural indeed ; but they are not the truest and 



76 SHAKSPEARE. 

most natural which the world will yet see. From 
the states of mind of a Hamlet and Macbeth, rise 
tones of which the words he has made them utter, 
bear but faint intelligence ; and which will find a 
stronger and yet stronger utterance as the will of the 
poet conforms to that of his Maker. Shakspeare 
was gifted with the power of the poet ; a power 
which, though he may have employed for the pur- 
poses intended, does not seem to have been ac- 
companied by that sense of responsibility which 
would have lent them their full and perfect effect. His 
creations are natural, but they are unconsciously so. 
He could but give to them his own life, which was 
one of impulse and not of principle. Man's brightest 
dignity is conscious nature ; and virtue when depriv- 
ed of this is robbed of her nobility ; and without it vice 
is but a pardonable weakness. Shakspeare is not to 
be esteemed so much a man, as a natural phenom- 
enon. We cannot say of him that he conformed to 
God's will ; but that the Divine Will in its ordinary op- 
erations moved his mind as it does the material world. 
He was natural from an unconscious obedience to the 
will of God ; we, if it acts not so strongly upon us 
but has left us the greater freedom, must become 
natural by a conscious obedience to it. He that is 
least in the kingdom of heaven, is greater than he. 

To show with what different effect his mind would 
have acted had it been deeply affected by the truths 



SHAKSPEARE. 77 

of Christianity ; and the consequent imperfections 
which his creations must exhibit to a mind so affect- 
ed, is evidently to be done not so much by precept, 
as by example, not so much by criticism on his, as 
by other characters of one's own. That to a mind 
of his power, virtue and vice would have had a 
deeper, and in no wise less natural signification from 
the superadded light of Revelation, no one, we think, 
can doubt. Our own souls must be rendered a fit 
medium of those spiritual conflicts we are listening 
to in the breasts of others ; else, some of the sounds 
which would otherwise come clear and distinct will 
fall faint and unmeaning, and others will be entirely 
lost to our spiritual ear. Shakspeare's mind was, as 
we have said, a pure and spotless mirror in which 
to reflect nature ; but it was the purity and spotless- 
ness of innocence, and not of virtue. Had that love 
of action which was so peculiarly the motive of 
Shakspeare's mind been followed also as a duty, it 
would have added a strength to his characters which 
we do not feel them now to possess. They are, it is 
true, natural, but they are no more than nature. How- 
ever amiable our feelings, — the common bonds of hu- 
manity, — they are weak as flaxen cords in the giant 
hands of our selfishness, unless strengthened by duty. 
Even a mother, whose heart is knit to her offspring in 
what would seem the closest of all natural ties, can, 



78 SHAKSPEARE. 

when her own selfish ends have made conquest of 
her soul, exclaim, 

" I have given suck ; and know 
How tender 'tis, to love the babe that milks me : 
I would, while it was smiling in my face, 
Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums, 
And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn as you 
Have done to this," 

Such and so weak is poor human nature. Had it not 
been so, a revelation of higher motives would not 
have been needed or given. Had Shakspeare felt 
these, his characters would have been more con- 
sciously natural. For the erring, he would have made 
us feel a deeper pity ; for the wicked, a stronger aver- 
sion ; and for the virtuous, a more enduring love. He 
would have made us feel that sinning as we do in 
the light both of nature and revelation, we should 
still continue to sin even amid the full broad blaze of 
heaven. 

In Shakspeare's works, I see but the ordinary pow- 
er of the Deity acting in mind, as I see it around me 
moulding to its purpose the forms of matter. But 
we are too apt to admire as the man that which we 
should only regard as the natural operation of the 
Divine Power. Struck with wonder by this natural 
action of the mind, we are too prone to dignify as 



SHAKSPEARE. 79 

that image of the Most High in which we were crea- 
ted, something which no more deserves the appella- 
tion of man, than the clod on which we tread. To 
be natural either consciously or unconsciously, is in- 
deed alone to be truly great ; for that which is so is 
God's. The material world, and to a hardly less 
extent the mental one of those we call great, are 
passive beneath his influence ; they are naturally, 
but unconsciously so. But man is gifted with a will 
whose highest exercise could he but recognise the 
awfulness of the trust, he would feel to be its per- 
fect accordance with his Maker's. But even from 
the first moment of his existence, when he dared 
disobedience to his conscience, he became unnatural ; 
and the fair Eden in which he was placed seemed 
no longer his home ; and he is driven a wanderer 
through his own Fatherland, and lets himself out as 
a hired servant to till those very fields which were 
once his own. To become natural, to find again that 
Paradise which he has lost, man must be born again, 
he must learn that the true exercise of his own will 
is only in listening to that voice which is ever walking 
in the garden, but of which he is afraid and hides 
himself. In the words of him who came not to do 
his own will, as we humble ourselves and become as 
little children, our minds will no longer be at vari- 
ance with the world without them ; but only a bright- 
er image than nature can be of the creator of both ; 



80 SHAKSPEARE. 

the true soul will be the conscious expression of na- 
ture. Shakspeare was natural ; but, if we may judge 
from his writings and life, he must have been as un- 
consciously so as a field or a stream. As we have 
said, he was not moved by common motives ; he 
wished but to live, and he passed without a prefer- 
ence through all the forms of living, and may be 
said to have been most truly himself in being others. 
Had he pursued the same course from a sense of 
duty, there would have been added to his characters 
that strength of will, or remorse at its loss in which 
we feel them especially wanting. That he acted 
from impulse and not from principle, shows us that 
he is not to be regarded as a man so much as a phe- 
nomenon ; that the tribute he would ask was admiration 
rather than praise. The careless manner in which he 
left his works has been wondered at, and lauded 
long enough, we hope, for christian men. When will 
we learn that the thing we call a man wants that 
which alone can entitle it to that appellation, when he 
can think a thought, or do a single act, much less 
leave the works of a whole life with ostrich-like in- 
difference on the barren sands of a world's neglect, 
without one look behind at their influence on the eter- 
nal happiness or misery of all being. 'Twas God's 
care only that the mind he sent labored not in vain. 
Action, in which God's will is not the motive, is 
sending the lightning flashes of heaven to play for 



SHAKSPEARE. 81 

men's amusement among the far-off clouds ; and not 
to flash in warning across the dark path of destruc- 
tion in which they are treading. It is the successive 
peals of thunder which, instead of purifying the 
moral atmosphere, are made to roll and burst only 
to create vainly repeated echoes among the hills. 
Shakspeare, though at times he may have been pos- 
sessed of this genius, must, in far the most numerous 
of his days and years, have been possessed by it. 
Lost in wonder at the countless beings that thronged 
uncalled the palace of his soul, and dwelt beneath 
its " majestical roof fretted with golden fires ;" he 
knew not, or if he knew, forgot that even those angel 
visitants were not sent for him merely to admire and 
number ; but that knowing no will but His who made 
kings his subjects, he should send them forth on their 
high mission, and with those high resolves which it 
was left for him to communicate. Had he done 
this, we might indeed reverence him as the image of 
his God ; as a sharer in His service, whose service 
is perfect freedom. 

From God's action in the mind of such men, we 
may learn, though with less clearness, that great 
lesson of Humility which He has revealed through 
his word. From genius, as well as revelation, we 
learn that our actions can alone become harmonious 
with the universality and naturalness which we see 
in the outward world, when they are made to accord 
6 



82 SHAKSPEARE. 

with the will of our Father. From both we learn, 
that of ourselves we can do no positive act ; but 
have only the power given us to render of no avail 
that which is so — that we cannot make one hair 
white or black ; that our seeming strength is weak- 
ness, nay, worse than weakness, unless it co-operates 
with God's. Let us labor then, knowing that the 
more we can erase from the tablets of our hearts 
the false fashions and devices which our own per- 
verse wills have written over them, the more will 
shine forth, with all their original brightness, those 
ancient primeval characters, traced there by the fin- 
ger of God, until our whole being is full of light. 



HAMLET. 



The play of Hamlet, when viewed with reference 
to the character of Shakspeare, which we have 
given, will no longer stand in that unique relation to 
the rest of his performances it has hitherto held ; but 
will be found to be more vitally connected, than any 
of them, with the great characteristics of the poet's 
mind. We have chosen this, therefore, because it 
illustrates our previous remarks ; and because these, 
in their turn, afford the position from which it is to 
be viewed. As to the time of its composition, it 
stands at about an equal distance between his first 
and last play ; and, we think, we can see the influ- 
ence of this upon those that succeed, in giving them 
more of a sobered and tragical interest. Those 
who have attempted an explanation of it, have failed 
from the want of a just conception of Hamlet's 
situation and character. • In Lear, and in many other 



84 HAMLET. 

of Shakspeare's plays, the chief character seems 
naturally to be that for which all the others were 
formed ; and, however important these are at first, 
as objects for the eye to rest on, they seem, at last, 
to the mind, but as shadings to show the main one in 
the strongest light. This is especially the case with 
Hamlet ; and they who have commented on it, seem 
to have erred from viewing that as of the greatest 
importance, which Shakspeare must have considered 
but as accidental. There is, to use his own words, 
" something more than natural" in this tragedy, " if 
philosophy could find it out." That which makes it 
so, is the playing up, in a peculiar manner, of the 
great features of Shakspeare's own mind — that sense 
of existence which must have been, as we have said, 
the accompanying state of so much and so varied ac- 
tivity. Hence the darkness which has so long hung 
over it ; a darkness which, for us, can only be dis- 
pelled, when we too rest on the same simple basis. 

Instead of feeling, continually, that the life is 
more than the food, and the body than the raiment; 
we live as if it were directly the other way, and by 
that very state of mind, are incapacitated almost 
from conceiving of one who stood in a truer relation 
to things ; to whose thoughts, time and space seem 
not to adhere as to ours — who could " put a girdle 
round about the earth in forty minutes," and to whom 
this, our life of years, was but " a bank and shoal of 



HAMLET. 85 

time." From the soul of him upon whom Christian- 
ity has had its true effect, as from before the face of 
him whom John saw in vision, sitting upon " a great 
white throne," " the earth and the heavens have fled 
away, and there is found no place for them." Shaks- 
peare was, as I have said, the childlike embodyment 
of this sense of existence. It found its natural ex- 
pression in the many forms of his characters ; in 
the circumstances of Hamlet, its peculiar one. As 
has been well observed, the others we love for some- 
thing that may be called adventitious ; bat we love 
him not, we think not of him because he was witty, 
because he is melancholy, but because he existed 
and was himself ; this is the sum total of the impres- 
sion. The great fore-plane of adversity has been 
driven over him, and his soul is laid bare to the very 
foundation. It is here that the poet is enabled to 
build deep down on the clear ground- work of being. 
It is because the interest lies here, that Shakspeare's 
own individuality becomes more than usually promi- 
nent. We here get down into his deep mind, and 
the thoughts that interested him, interest us. Here 
is where our Shakspeare suffered, and, at times, a 
golden vein of his own fortune penetrates to the sur- 
face of Hamlet's character, and enriches, with a new 
value, the story of his sorrows. 

If Shakspeare's master passion then was, as we 
have seen it to be, the love of intellectual activity 



86 



HAMLET. 



for its own sake, his continual satisfaction with the 
simple pleasure of existence must have made him 
more than commonly liable to the fear of death ; or, 
at least, made that change the great point of interest 
in his hours of reflection. Often and often must he 
have thought, that, to be or not to be forever, was a 
question, which must be settled ; as it is the founda- 
tion, and the only foundation upon which we feel that 
there can rest one thought, one feeling, or one pur- 
pose worthy of a human soul. Other motives had 
no hold upon him ; — place, riches, favors, the prizes 
of accident, he could lose and still exclaim, u For- 
tune and I are friends," but the thought of death 
touched him in his very centre. However strong 
the sense of continued life such a mind as his may 
have had, it could never reach that assurance of 
eternal existence, which Christ alone can give, — 
which alone robs the grave of victory, and takes 
from death its sting. Here lie the materials out of 
which this remarkable tragedy was built up. From 
the wrestling of his own soul with the great enemy, 
comes that depth and mystery which startles us in 
Hamlet. 

It is to this condition that Hamlet has been re- 
duced. This is the low portal of grief to which we 
must stoop, before we can enter the heaven-pointing 
pile that the poet has raised to his memory. Stun- 
ned by the sudden storm of woes, he doubts, as he 



HAMLET. 87 

looks at the havoc spread around him, whether he 
himself is left, and fears lest the very ground on 
which he lies prostrate, may not prove treacherous. 
Stripped of all else, he is sensible on this point alone. 
Here is the life from which all else grows. Inter- 
ested in the glare of prosperity around him, only be- 
cause he lives, he is ever turning his eyes from it to 
the desolation in which he himself stands. His 
glance ever descends from the lofty pinnacle of pride 
and false security to the rotten foundation, — and 
tears follow smiles. He raises his eye to heaven, 
and " this brave o'erhanging firmament" seems to him 
but u a pestilential congregation of vapors ;" it de- 
scends to earth, and u its goodly frame seems a sterile 
promontory." He fixes it on man, and his noble apos- 
trophe — "what a piece of work is a man! How 
noble in reason ! How infinite in faculties, in form 
and moving, how express and admirable ! in action, 
how like an angel ! in apprehension, how like a 
god !" is followed fast upon by the sad confession, 
" Yet man delights me not, nor woman neither." 
He does not, as we say, u get accustomed to his sit- 
uation." He holds fast by the wisdom of afflic- 
tion, and will not let her go. He would keep her, 
for she is his life. The storm has descended, and 
all has been swept away but the rock. To this he 
clings for safety. He will not return, like the dog to 
his vomit. He will not render unavailing the les- 



88 HAMLET. 

sons of Providence by " getting accustomed" to feed 
on that which is not bread, on which to live is death. 
He fears nothing save the loss of existence. But 
this thought thunders at the very base of the cliff 
on which, ship-wrecked of every other hope, he had 
been thrown. That which to every body else seems 
common, presses upon him with an all-absorbing in- 
terest; he struggles with the mystery of his own 
being, the root of all other mysteries, until it has 
become an overmastering element in his own mind, 
before which all others yield and seem as nothing. 

This is the hinge on which his every endeavor 
turns. Such a thought as this might well prove more 
than an equal counterpoise to any incentive to what 
we call action. The obscurity that lies over these 
depths of Hamlet's character, arises from this unique 
position in which the poet exhibits him ; a position 
which opens to us the basis of Shakspeare's own be- 
ing, and which, though dimly visible to all, is yet 
familiar to but few. There is action indeed, but pro- 
jected on so gigantic a scale, that, like the motion of 
some of the heavenly bodies, from whom we are in- 
conceivably removed, it seems a perpetual rest. 
With Dr. Johnson, and other commentators, we are 
at first inclined to blame Hamlet's inactivity, and call 
him weak and cowardly ; but as we proceed, and 
his character and situation open upon us, such epi- 
thets seem least of all applicable to him. So far is 



HAMLET. 89 

he from being a coward, in the common meaning of 
that term, that he does not set this life at a pin's 
fee. He is contending in thought with the great 
realities beyond it — the dark clouds that hang over 
the valley of the shadow of death, and float but dim- 
ly and indistinct before our vision, have, like his 
father's ghost, become fixed and definite " in his 
mind's eye ;" he has looked them into shape, and 
they stand before him wherever he turns, with a pres- 
ence that will not be put by. Thus it is, that to 
most he seems a coward, and that enterprises which 
to others appear of great pith and moment, 

" With this regard, their currents turn awry 
And lose the name of action." 

Macbeth is contending with the realities of this world, 
Hamlet with those of the next. The struggle which 
is going on in the far-seeing mind of Hamlet never 
arrives at its consummation ; Macbeth, on the con- 
trary, is short-sighted enough to contend with the 
whips and scorns of time, and with him, therefore, 
the mental conflict is soon over. 

"If it were done, when 'tis done, then 'twere well 
It were done quickly : If the assassination 
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch 
With his surcease success ; that but this blow 



90 HAMLET. 

Might be the be-all and the end-all here. 
But here upon this bank and shoal of time 
We'd jump the life to come." 

But it may be asked, if Hamlet valued this life so 
cheaply, nay, even meditated self-slaughter, why, 
when he had an opportunity of dying by only suffer- 
ing himself to be carried to England, he should fly 
that very death he before sought ? To this question, 
the state of his mind affords us a satisfactory answer ; 
and his wavering does but confirm our belief in his 
sincerity, and give us a still stronger proof, that al- 
though there is nothing from which he would more 
willingly part withal — except, as he says, u my 
life," yet still does the deep instinct of his soul 
prompt him to retain it, though crushed by the bur- 
den, while he doubts lest with its loss, may not be 
connected the loss of all being. He cared not, as 
he says, for this little life, a pin's fee ; but for life it- 
self, his whole nature called in cries that would not 
be silenced. In his perplexity and doubt, Hamlet 
had interrogated his own nature on the great ques- 
tion of his future being ; but its only response was 
— " the dread of something after death ;" that some- 
thing might be annihilation, or, 

" To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot. 
or to be worse than worst 



HAMLET. 91 

Of those, that lawless and uncertain thoughts 
Imagine howling." 

In the bitterness of his spirit, but half concealed by 
his jests in the graveyard, he asks again that ques- 
tion from which he cannot escape, sending his voice 
down into the hollow tomb, and hearing but the echo 
of his own words in reply. He loved not this life, 
yet endured and clung to it because he doubted of 
another ; this it was 

" That made calamity of so long life, 
And made him rather bear those ills he had 
Than fly to others that he knew not of." 

This doubt still remained after all his reasoning; 
and, gathering strength at the moment of death's ac- 
tual approach, led him, like the old man with the 
bundle of sticks, to deny that he had summoned him. 
This view will account for Hamlet's indecision. 
With him the next world, by the intense, action of 
his thoughts, had become as real as the present; 
and, whenever this is the case, thought must always 
at first take precedence of action. We have said at 
first, for it ends in giving the strength of the spirit to 
the arm of flesh. Hamlet frequently accuses him- 
self of cowardice and indecision, yet is fully con- 
scious, at the same time, of faultlessness. We too 



92 HAMLET. 

go with him, and at first accuse him of it, and after- 
wards rest in as full a conviction as he himself, that 
he is not a coward. Could we view him from the 
position in which Shakspeare must have seen him, 
he would appear a hero of loftier stature and nobler 
action, than any other that now wins our admiration 
from among his numberless creations. Had we 
Shakspeare's eye, we should not so much be touched 
by the mere outward show of madness and inaction, 
but looking beyond these at the deeper meaning, 
should exclaim, 

" O, what a noble mind is here ! 
The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's, eye, tongue, 

sword, 
The expectancy and rose of the fair state, 
The glass of fashion, and the mould of form, 
The observed of all observers !" 

Then too might we understand the delicate and hid- 
den satire in that comparison which he makes be- 
tween himself and Fortinbras. 

" Witness this army of such mass and charge, 
Led by a delicate and tender prince, 
Whose spirit with divine ambition pufF'd, 
Makes mouths at the invisible event ; 
Exposing what is mortal and unsure, 



HAMLET. \)3 

To all that fortune, death and danger dare 
Even for an egg-shell.'" 

Even the revenge which suggests itself to Hamlet is 
not of this world. To others it would assume a 
character of the most savage enormity, and one 
from which, of all men, the tender and conscientious 
prince would soonest shrink. But with him it is as 
natural as his most ordinary action. He has looked 
through the slight afflictions of this world, and his 
prophetic eye is fixed on the limitless extent beyond. 
Here and here alone, will the fire of the king's in- 
cestuous lust burn unquenched, and the worm of re- 
morse never die. Hence are heard the words that 
seem to rise from a fiendish depth in the bosom. 

" Up sword and know thou a more horrid hent : 
When he is drunk, asleep, or in his rage." 

We, who dignify as " enterprises of great pith and 
moment," the actions of those who like Fortinbras 

" Make mouths at the invisible event," 

are but poorly fitted to judge of one to whom " the 
invisible event" is the whole. That regard which 
checked Macbeth's action in part, checked Hamlet's 
altogether. We may, by and by, come to see that 



94 HAMLET. 

there may be more of true heroic action in a mental 
conflict that never results in a deed, than in a thou- 
sand that do ; that it is at the root of the tree of 
self within the heart, that Christ has laid the axe ; and 
that here fall the blows that sound loudest and farth- 
est through the kingdom of Satan. We have to do 
with this world only, and the objects of sense which 
are our daily care, unmodified by the great ideas of 
death and eternity, stand before us in a light and 
greatness not their own. Hamlet, on the other hand, 
is dealing with both worlds at once ; and, under the 
influence of those spiritual realities which should 
qualify our thoughts, he describes objects in a man- 
ner, which from our position appears very strange 
and distorting. Under the transforming power of 
such ideas, what seems to us of permanent shape 
and coloring, to him is like a many-tinted cloud 
continually varying in hue and form. 

Hamlet, Do you see yonder cloud, that's almost 
in the shape of a camel ? 

Polonius. By the mass, and 'tis like a camel in- 
deed. 

Hamlet. Methinks, it is like a weasel. 

Polonius. It is backed like a weasel. 

Hamlet. Or, like a w T hale ? 

Polonius. Very like a whale. 



HAMLET. 95 

After all that has been said to explain the apparent 
inactivity of Hamlet, we must still feel that, although 
we have accounted for, and shown the naturalness 
of his delay, yet the character of the son, and he 
"the son of a dear father murdered," is still some- 
what less earnest in Hamlet than we should have ex- 
pected. This particular view of his circumstance, 
which we have given, is pressed too far home to be 
entirely natural. It seems as if Shakspeare, feeling a 
more than common sympathy with the situation he 
had assumed for the expression of his own feelings, 
put too much of himself, so to speak, in the compo- 
sition. We feel that Hamlet is rather such a son as 
Shakspeare would have made, than the Hamlet of 
the king's own household. The poet's intention 
in this play was not, we think, as Goethe says, " to 
exhibit the effects of a great action imposed as a du- 
ty on a mind too feeble for its accomplishment ;" 
nor, as Coleridge expresses it, "to exhibit a charac- 
ter flying from the sense of reality and seeking a re- 
prieve from the pressure of its duties in that ideal 
activity, the overbalance of which with the conse- 
quent indisposition to action is Hamlet's disease." 
These are but accidents, and had the design been 
such as these suppose in Shakspeare, this play would 
never have been written. No, it was not for ends 
like these, but for an end of which these should 
prove but accidents. Was he strongly sensible of a 



96 HAMLET. 

purpose, — it must have been to open to our view that 
wild tumultuous sea of thoughts which was rolling in 
the breast of Hamlet, when the idea of death and 
the presence of things invisible, stood sensible to 
sight and touch before him. This thought, breaking 
upon him in so terrible and unexpected a form, tore 
from life, at one rude grasp, the gaudy and alluring 
attire with which it is arrayed to the eye of sense ; 
and, blotting out " all trivial fond records, all saws of 
books," it fronted him in its own grim reality. Well 
might he feel, if this was all there was of living, to 
him it was valueless. Unlike Claudio and Macbeth, 
the goods of this world, were they all, appeared not 
to him of consequence enough to deserve a moment's 
regard ; — in the wide firmament of his vision, time 
and space had dwindled to what they really are, 
but golden points of an immensity. 

Hamlet has been called mad, but, as we think, 
Shakspeare thought more of his madness than he did 
of the wisdom of the rest of the play. Like the 
vision-struck Paul, in the presence of Felix, he 
spoke what to those around him, whose eyes had not 
been opened on that light brighter than the sun, 
seemed madness ; but which was, in fact, the words 
of truth and soberness. Men have felt that though 
mad, as they thought, there was still a method in it ; 
and that there was something in his language which 
revealed them to themselves, and to which, though 



HAMLET. 97 

ignorant of its full meaning, every human heart 
must and does beat responsive. We must not sup- 
pose from the impression that words make upon us, 
that we necessarily understand what they mean to 
others. We are but too apt to mistake for knowledge 
the sounds that give us a mere outside recognition 
of the states of mind from which they proceed- . 
ed. It is the spirit that quickens what we hear, 
— the mere hearing is nothing. The words which 
I say to you, says our Savior, are spirit, and quicken 
with eternal life, — they are not addressed to the 
flesh, nor are they life-giving to that. We must not 
think, because we know the dictionary meaning of 
the word Death, and can enumerate a few of the sen- 
sible changes it produces, that we know its whole 
meaning, — all that one feels when it has become a 
frequent thought to his mind, modifying, as it was de- 
signed to do, every other thought. Much less must 
we suppose ourselves to have found the divine mean- 
ing of that eternal life of which Jesus speaks ; until 
we have experienced that death of our own wills, 
against which we are to strive continually in our 
minds unto blood, Shakspeare's words too, like 
those of all true men, have a meaning whose ful- 
ness can only be felt by a spirit in a similar state 
to his from whose lips they fell. Spoken with- 
out this, they are but sounds filling the empty cham- 
bers of the soul with noisy echoes. They pass be- 
1 



98 HAMLET. 

fore us, dim and shadowy, as the phantom kings be- 
fore the eyes of Macbeth, the silent witnesses of a 
world to us unrealized ; — speechless, save as the 
workings of our own souls give them utterance. Let 
us not then suppose, that, by treasuring up the golden 
language that has fallen from other tongues of pow- 
er, we are gaining for ourselves a fast possession ; 
for unless their spirit is growing up within us, 
to fill their dumb words with the eloquence of life, 
our piled wealth, like the rich colored leaves of au- 
tumn, will shrink in our hands to the dark and worth- 
less emblems of decay. 

We need not go farther to show, what will now be 
apparent, the tendency of Shakspeare to overact 
this particular part of Hamlet, and thus give it an 
obscurity from too close a connexion with his own 
mind, — a state so difficult to approach. It is plain 
that to him the thought of death, and the condition 
of being to which that change might subject him, 
would ever be his nearest thoughts ; and that, where- 
ever there exists the strong sense of life, these ideas 
must follow hard upon it. In the question of Ham- 
let, the thoughts, as well as the words, have their 
natural order, when " to be" is followed by " not to 
be." And we think that no one can read the words of 
Claudio, or the soliloquy of Hamlet, without thinking 
that, for Shakspeare, they must have had no com- 
mon meaning. Here we find a reason for his occu- 



HAMLET. - 99 

pying so strongly this particular position. This idea 
not only renders the inconsistencies of Hamlet har- 
monious, but places also the whole tragedy on a 
common ground with the rest of Shakspeare 's plays. 
Viewed in its light they all become but part and par- 
cel of one mind ; without it, Hamlet must always re- 
main, as it has hitherto done, a character apart from 
that of the others, darkened with a mystery too deep 
for us to scan. Our thoughts, and those of Hamlet 
and Shakspeare are strangely opposite. With them, 
to be or not to be, — that is the question ; with us there 
is no question at all about that, — we take that to be 
settled. With us, to be rich or not to be rich, to be 
wise or not to be wise, to be honored or not to be 
honored, — those are the questions. It is because we 
live so continually in this state of mind, that we are 
finable to conceive of Hamlet's character, and to see 
Shakspeare himself in his creations. This it is that 
inclines many to say of the celebrated soliloquy, as 
Goldsmith has said, that it " is in our opinion, a heap 
of absurdities, whether we consider the situation, the 
sentiments, the argumentation or the poetry; that 
it does not appear that Hamlet had the least reason 
to wish for death, but every motive which may be 
supposed to influence, concurred to render life de- 
sirable, — revenge towards the usurper ; love for the 
fair Ophelia ; and the ambition of reigning." We 
should naturally think with Goldsmith, and think 



100 HAMLET. 

rightly, that if these were all the motives that influ- 
enced Shakspeare in the conception of Hamlet, there 
were a great many things in the play besides the so- 
liloquy, that were out of place. Johnson viewed it 
also in this manner, and, in consequence, says ; 
u that there are some scenes which neither forward 
nor retard the action, and that for the feigned mad- 
ness of Hamlet there is no adequate cause, for he 
does nothing which he might not have done with the 
reputation of sanity." But the moment we consid- 
er that this is but a quarter thought by which we 
would endeavour to explain the whole ; and that the 
largest half of his design must have been to show 
the action in which his own mind was thrown in 
Hamlet's case, these difficulties at once clear up ; 
and the parts that before stood out as dark and un- 
sightly excrescences from the play, become, in an in- 
stant, its gilded summits of light. The thoughts of 
the soliloquy are not found to belong to a particular 
part of this play, but to be the spirit of the whole. 
To be or not to be is written over its every scene 
from the entrance of the ghost, to the rude inscrip- 
tion over the gate -way of the church-yard ; and, 
whenever we shall have built up, in ourselves, the 
true conception of this the greatest of the poets, 
To be or not to be, will be found to be chiselled in 
golden letters on the very key-stone of that arch 
which tells us of his memory. 



HAMLET, 101 

It is this mystery which hangs over our being, and 
which Shakspeare felt more strongly, perhaps, than 
any other of our race ever did, that enabled him to 
cast so deep the dark foundations of his supernat- 
ural beings, and give them all but that power over 
us which their actual visitation would have. It is 
not that the ghost has usurped the form and majesty 
of buried Denmark, and 

" again in complete steel 
Revisits thus the glimpses of the moon, 
Making night hideous," 

that he chains us with awe ; but it is because he has 
usurped a form which, in the moments when we are 
most ourselves, our own souls will summon up to 
question the secrets of their destiny. We do not 
fear it more than Hamlet ; for we feel there is some 
natural connection between us and another world, 
" being," as he says, " things immortal as itself." 
And again, in the soliloquy, when Hamlet speaks of 

" The undiscovered country, from whose bourne 
No traveller returns" — 

why has he forgotten his spiritual visitant, unless it 
was to show us how trifling and unimportant this in- 
cident was in the play, before the .great reality of a 
soul unsatisfied in its longings after immortality ? 



102 HAMLET. 

A state of mind like this affords an easy and nat- 
ural solution of Hamlet's treatment of Ophelia. He- 
loved her deeply, — deeper than aught else ; yet when 
she broke in upon his soliloquy, in which existence 
itself now and forever seemed questionable, and 
the sun, on which that world of love within his 
bosom hung, seemed ready to be blotted out, the 
thought of all this might well work in him that 
bitterness, whose poignance but the more strongly 
proved his- love. The view of the world and all its 
hopes and fears which he has just expressed, is a 
sufficient explanation of the whole scene. As he 
has said before, man delights him not nor woman 
neither ; and as the thought too of his uncle's and 
his mother's wickedness presses upon his mind, and 
there seems to him nothing that can be trusted, no- 
thing sure ; we may pardon the harshness of his 
words to Ophelia, "Get thee to a nunnery; why 
shouldst thou be a breeder of sinners ?" Then too 
we may sympathize with him, when T as if to palliate 
a harshness which in his present state of mind he 
cannot but feel, he turns with like reproach upon 
himself — U I am myself indifferent honest." His 
language therefore, in this scene, is in perfect keep- 
ing with the rest of the play, and his own character.. 
There is no dissimulation, as has been supposed, — 
for there was need of none. 

The words of Hamlet as a lover are, as we think,, 



HAMLET. 103 

in some respects parallel to those addressed by him 
as a son to his father's shade, — when he exclaims 
to the ghost beneath ; " Ha, ha, boy ! sayst thou so ; 
art thou there, true penny?" and again — "Well 
said, old mole ! canst work in the earth so fast?" In 
the height of emotion and mental conflict to which 
he is raised by these contemplations, he finds re- 
lief, as in the grave yard, in expressions which 
seem strangely at variance with each other ; but 
which, in reality, are but natural alternations. So 
much does he dwell in the world of spirits that there 
is a sort of ludicrous aspect upon which his mind 
seizes as often as it returns to this. " There is 
something," says Scott, u in my deepest afflictions 
and most gloomy hours, that compels me to mix 
with my distresses strange snatches of mirth, which 
have no mirth in them." 

Before we lose sight of this noblest, yet still un- 
appreciated monument of Shakspeare's mind, we 
cannot but pause for a moment and look back with 
awe and admiration upon its dark and majestic out- 
line, as it stands towering against the sky, — the 
kingly pyramid of the prince of Denmark covering 
in its secret chambers a mystery more hidden, and 
precious, than that which the pile of an Egyptian 
monarch, though reared with a thousand hands, is 
fabled to conceal. His thoughts, though common 

with us as the sun-light and the air, are, like them, 

-A 



104 HAMLET. 

mighty hieroglyphics which may indeed have false 
meanings attached to them, but which can never be 
interpreted until the wisdom of God is shed abroad 
in our hearts. Then shall we read and understand. 
Then may we be touched by his own sadness as we 
listen to this last farewell of our Shakspeare. 

u Our revels now are ended : these our actors, 
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and 
Are melted into air, into thin air : 
And like the baseless fabric of this vision, 
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, 
The solemn temples, the great globe itself, 
Yea all which it inherit shall dissolve ; 
And like this unsubstantial pageant faded, 
Leave not a rack behind : we are such stuff 
As dreams are made of, and our little life 
Is rounded with a sleep. Sir I am vexed ; 
Bear with my weakness ; my old brain is troub- 
led. 
Be not disturbed with my infirmity : 

But hence retire me to my" Avon, " where 
Every third thought shall be my grave. n 



POEMS. 



POEMS. 



TO THE HUMMING-BIRD. 

I cannot heal thy green gold breast, 
Where deep those cruel teeth have prest, 
Nor bid thee raise thy ruffled crest, 

And seek thy mate. 
Who sits alone within thy nest, 

Nor sees thy fate. 

No more with him in summer hours 
Thou'lt hum amid the leafy bowers, 
Nor hover round the dewy flowers, 

To feed thy young ; 
Nor seek, when evening darkly lowers, 

Thy nest high hung. 



108 POEMS. 

No more thou'lt know a mother's care 
Thy honied spoils at eve to share, 
Nor teach thy tender brood to dare 

With upward spring, 
Their path through fields of sunny air, 

On new fledged wing. 

For thy return in vain shall wait 

Thy tender young, thy fond fond mate, 

Till night's last stars beam forth full late 

On their sad eyes ; 
Unknown, alas ! thy cruel fate, 

Unheard thy cries ! 



POEMS. 109 

Ehetj! fugaces, Posthume, Posthume, 
Labuntue, anni. 

Fleeting years are ever bearing 

In their silent course away- 
All that in our pleasures sharing 

Lent to life a cheering ray. 

Beauty's cheek but blooms to wither, 

Smiling hours but come to fly ; 
They are gone ; Time's but the giver 

Of whate'er is doomed to die. 

Thou may'st touch with blighting finger 

All that sense can here enjoy ; 
Yet within my soul shall linger 

That which thou canst not destroy. 

Love's sweet voice shall there awaken 

Joys that earth cannot impart ; 
Joys that live when thou hast taken 

All that here can charm the heart. 

As the years come gliding by me, 

Fancy's pleasing visions rise ; 
Beauty's cheek, ah ! still I see thee ? 

Still your glances, soft blue eyes ! 



110 POEMS. 

LINES 

TO A WITHERED LEAF SEEN ON A POET'S TABLE. 

Poet's hand has placed thee there, 
Autumn's brown and withered scroll ! 
Though to outward eye not fair, 
Thou hast beauty for the soul, 

Though no human pen has traced 
On that leaf its learned lore, 
Love divine the page has graced,-— 
What can words discover more ? 

Not alone dim Autumn's blast 
Echoes from yon tablet sear, — » 
Distant music of the Past 
Steals upon the poet's ear. 

Voices sweet of summer hours, 
Spring's soft whispers murmur by ; 
Feathered songs from leafy bowers 
Draw his listening soul on high. 



POEMS* 111 



MEMORY. 



Soon the waves so lightly bounding 
All forget the tempest blast ; 

Soon the pines so sadly sounding 
Cease to mourn the storm that's past* 

Soon is hushed the voice of gladness 
Heard within the green wood's breast ; 

Yet come back no notes of sadness, 
No remembrance breaks its rest* 

But the heart, — how fond t'will treasure 
Every note of grief and joy ! 

Oft come back the notes of pleasure, 
Grief's sad echoes oft annoy. 

There still dwell the looks that vanish 
Swift as brightness of a dream ; 

Time in vain earth's smiles may banish, 
There undying still they beam* 



112 POEMS. 



TO THE PAINTED COLUMBINE. 

Bright image of the early years 
When glowed my cheek as red as thou, 
And life's dark throng of cares and fears 
Were swift-winged shadows o'er my sunny brow ! 

Thou blushest from the painter's page, 
Robed in the mimic tints of art ; 
But Nature's hand in youth's green age 
With fairer hues first traced thee on my heart. 

The morning's blush, she made it thine, 
The morn's sweet breath, she gave it thee, 
And in thy look, my Columbine ! 
Each fond-remembered spot she bade me see. 

I see the hill's far-gazing head, 
Where gay thou noddest in the gale ; 
I hear light-bounding footsteps tread 
The grassy path that winds along the vale. 

I hear the voice of woodland song 
Break from each bush and well-known tree, 
And on light pinions borne along, 
Comes back the laugh from childhood's heart of glee. 



POEMS. 113 

CPer the dark rock the dashing brook, 
With look of anger, leaps again, 
And, hastening to each flowery nook, 
Its distant voice is heard far down the glen. 

Fair child of art ! thy charms decay, 
Touched by the withered hand of Time ; 
And hushed the music of that day, 
When my voice mingled with the streamlet's chime ; 

But on my heart thy cheek of bloom 
Shall live when Nature's smile has fled; 
And, rich with memory's sweet perfume, 
Shall o'er her grave thy tribute incense shed. 

There shalt thou live and wake the glee 
That echoed on thy native hill ; 
And when, loved flower ! I think of thee, 
My infant feet will seem to seek thee still. 



114 POEMS, 



TO THE FOSSIL FLOWER. 

Dark fossil flower ! I see thy leaves unrolled, 
With all thy lines of beauty freshly marked, 
As when the eye of Morn beamed on thee first, 
And thou first turn'dst to meet its welcome smile. 
And sometimes in the coals' bright rain-bow hues, 
I dream I see the colors of thy prime, 
And for a moment robe thy form again 
In splendor not its own. Flower of the past ! 
Now as I look on thee, life's echoing tread 
Falls noiseless on my ear ; the present dies ; 
And o'er my soul the thoughts of distant time, 
In silent waves, like billows from the sea, 
Come roling on and on, with ceaseless flow, 
Innumerable. Thou may'st have sprung unsown 
Into thy noon of life, when first earth heard 
Its Maker's sovereign voice ; and laughing flowers 
Waved o'er the meadows, hung on mountain crags, 
And nodded in the breeze on every hill. 
Thou may'st have bloomed unseen, save by the stars 
That sang together o'er thy rosy birth, 
An(J came at eve to watch thy folded rest. 
None may have sought thee on thy fragrant home, 
Save light-voiced winds that round thy dwelling 
played, 



POEMS. 115 

Or seemed to sigh, as oft their winged haste 
Compelled their feet to roam. Thou may'st have 

lived 
Beneath the light of later days, when man 
With feet free-roving as the homeless wind, 
Scaled the thick-mantled height, coursed plains un- 
shorn, 
Breaking the solitude of nature's haunt 
With voice that seemed to blend, in one sweet strain, 
The mingled music of the elements. 
And when against his infant frame they rose, 
Uncurbed, unawed by his yet feeble hand, 
And when the muttering storm, and shouting wave, 
And rattling thunder, mated, round him raged, 
And seemed at times like daemon foes to gird, 
Thou may'st have won with gentle look his heart, 
And stirred the first warm prayer of gratitude, 
And been his first, his simplest altar-gift. 
For thee, dark flower! the kindling sun can bring 
No more the colors that it gave, nor morn, 
With kindly kiss, restore thy breathing sweets : 
Yet may the mind's mysterious touch recall 
The bloom and fragrance of thy early prime : 
For He who to the lowly lily gave 
A glory richer than to proudest king, 
He painted not those darkly-shining leaves, 
With blushes like the dawn, in vain ; nor gave 
To thee its sweetly-scented breath, to waste 



116 POEMS. 

Upon the barren air. E'en though thou stood 
Alone in nature's forest-home untrod, 
The first-love of the stars and sighing winds, 
The mineral holds with faithful trust thy form, 
To wake in human hearts sweet thoughts of love, 
Now the dark past hangs round thy memory. 



POEMS. 117 



TO THE CANARY BIRD. 

I cannot hear thy voice with others' ears, 

Who make of thy lost liberty a gain ; 

And in thy tale of blighted hopes and fears 

Feel not that every note is born with pain. 

Alas ! that with thy music's gentle swell 

Past days of joy should through thy memory 

throng, 
And each to thee their words of sorrow tell, 
While ravished sense forgets thee in thy song. 
The heart that on the past and future feeds, 
And pours in human words its thoughts divine, 
Though at each birth the spirit inly bleeds, 
Its song may charm the listening ear like thine, 
And men with gilded cage and praise will try 
To make the bard like thee forget his native sky. 



118 POEMS. 



NATURE. 

Nature ! my love for thee is deeper far 
Than strength of words though spirit-born can tell ; 
For while I gaze they seem my soul to bar, 
That in thy widening streams would onward swell 
Bearing thy mirrored beauty on its breast, — 
Now, through thy lonely haunts unseen to glide, 
A motion that scarce knows itself from rest, 
With pictured flowers and branches on its tide ; 
Then, by the noisy city's frowning wall, 
Whose armed heights within its waters gleam, 
To rush with answering voice to ocean's call, 
And mingle with the deep its swollen stream, 
Whose boundless bosom's calm alone can hold, 
That heaven of glory in thy skies unrolled. 



POEMS. 119 



THE TREE. 



I love thee when thy swelling buds appear 
And one by one their tender leaves unfold, 
As if they knew that warmer suns were near, 
Nor longer sought to hide from winter's cold ; 
And when with darker growth thy leaves are seen 
To veil front view the early robin's nest, 
I love to lie beneath thy waving skreen 
With limbs by summer's heat and toil opprest ; 
And when the autumn winds have stript thee bare, 
And round thee lies the smooth untrodden snow, 
When nought is thine that made thee once so fair, 
I love to watch thy shadowy form betow, 
And through thy leafless arms to look above 
On stars that brighter beam when most we need their 
love. 



120 POEMS. 



THE STRANGER'S GIFT. 

I found far culled from fragrant field and grove 
Each flower that makes our Spring a welcome 

guest ; 
In one sweet bond of brotherhood inwove 
An osier band their leafy stalks compressed ; 
A stranger's hand had made their bloom my own, 
And fresh their fragrance rested on the air ; 
His gift was mine — but he who gave unknown, 
And my heart sorrowed though the flowers were 

fair. 
Now oft I grieve to meet them on the lawn, 
As sweetly scattered round my path they grow, 
By One who on their petals paints the dawn, 
And gilt with sunset splendors bids them glow, 
For I ne'er asked c who steeps them in perfume ? r 
Nor anxious sought His love who crowns them all 

with bloom. 



POEMS. 121 



THY BEAUTY FADES. 

Thy beauty fades and with it too my love, 
For 'twas the self-same stalk that bore its flower ; 
Soft fell the rain, and breaking from above 
The sun looked out upon our nuptial hour ; 
And I had thought forever by thy side 
With bursting buds of hope in youth to dwell, 
But one by one Time strewed thy petals wide, 
And every hope's wan look a grief can tell : 
For I had thoughtless lived beneath his sway, 
Who like a tyrant dealeth with us all, 
Crowning each rose, though rooted on decay, 
With charms that shall the spirit's love enthral, 
And for a season turn the soul's pure eyes 
From virtue's changeless bloom that time and death 
defies. 



122 POEMS. 



BEAUTY. 

I gazed upon thy face, — and beating life 
Once stilled its sleepless pulses in my breast, 
And every thought whose being was a strife 
Each in its silent chamber sank to rest ; 
I was not, save it were a thought of thee, 
The world was but a spot where thou hadst trod, 
From every star thy glance seemed fixed on me, 
Almost I loved thee better than my God. 
And still I gaze, — but 'tis a holier thought 
Than that in which my spirit lived before, 
Each star a purer ray of love has caught, 
Earth wears a lovelier robe than then it wore, 
And every lamp that burns around thy shrine 
Is fed with fire whose fountain is Divine. 



POEMS. 123 



THE WIND-FLOWER. 

Thou lookest up with meek confiding eye 
Upon the clouded smile of April's face, 
Unharmed though Winter stands uncertain by 
Eyeing with jealous glance each opening grace 
Thou trustest wisely ! in thy faith arrayed 
More glorious thou than Israel's wisest King ; 
Such faith was his whom men to death betrayed 
As thine who hear'st the timid voice of Spring, 
While other flowers still hide them from her call 
Along the river's brink and meadow bare. 
Thee will I seek beside the stony wall, 
And in thy trust with childlike heart would share,* 
O'erjoyed that in thy early leaves I find 
A lesson taught by him who loved all human kind. 



124 POEMS. 



THE ROBIN. 



Thou need'st not flutter from thy half-built nest, 
Whene'er thou hear'st man's hurrying feet go by, 
Fearing his eye for harm may on thee rest, 
Or he thy young unfinished cottage spy ; 
All will not heed thee on that swinging bough, 
Nor care that round thy shelter spring the leaves, 
Nor watch thee on the pool's wet margin now 
For clay to plaster straws thy cunning weaves ; 
All will not hear thy sweet out-pouring joy, 
That with morn's stillness blends the voice of song, 
For over-anxious cares their souls employ, 
That else upon thy music borne along 
And the light wings of heart-ascending prayer 
Had learned that Heaven is pleased thy simple joys 
to share. 



POEMS. 125 



THE COLUMBINE. 

Still, still my eye will gaze long fixed on thee, 
Till I forget that I am called a man, 
And at thy side fast-rooted seem to be, 
And the breeze comes my cheek with thine to fan. 
Upon this craggy hill our life shall pass, 
A life of summer days and summer joys, 
Nodding our honey-bells mid pliant grass 
In which the bee half hid his time employs ; 
And here we'll drink with thirsty pores the rain, 
And turn dew-sprinkled to the rising sun, 
And look when in the flaming west again 
His orb across the heaven its path has run ; 
Here left in darkness on the rocky steep, 
My weary eyes shall close like folding flowers in 
sleep. 



126 POEMS. 



THE NEW BIRTH. 

'Tis a new life ; — thoughts move not as they did 

With slow uncertain steps across my mind, 

In thronging haste fast pressing on they bid 

The portals open to the viewless wind 

That comes not save when in the dust is laid 

The crown of pride that gilds each mortal brow, 

And from before man's vision melting fade 

The heavens and earth ; — their walls are falling 

now. — 
Fast crowding on, each thought asks utterance strong ; 
Storm-lifted waves swift rushing to the shore, 
On from the sea they send their shouts along, 
Back through the cave -worn rocks their thunders 

roar ; 
And I a child of God by Christ made free 
Start from death's slumbers to Eternity. 



POEMS. 127 



THE SON. 

Father I wait thy word. The sun doth stand 
Beneath the mingling line of night and day, 
A listening servant, waiting thy command 
To roll rejoicing on its silent way ; 
The tongue of time abides the appointed hour, 
Till on our ear its solemn warnings fall ; 
The heavy cloud withholds the pelting shower, 
Then every drop speeds onward at thy call ; 
The bird reposes on the yielding bough, 
With breast unswollen by the tide of song, 
So does my spirit wait thy presence now 
To pour thy praise in quickening life along, 
Chiding with voice divine man's lengthened sleep, 
While round the Unuttered Word and Love their 
vigils keep. 



128 POEMS. 



IN HIM WE LIVE . 

Father ! I bless thy name that I do live, 
And in each motion am made rich with thee, 
That when a glance is all that I can give, 
It is a kingdom's wealth if I but see ; 
This stately body cannot move, save I 
Will to its nobleness my little bring ; 
My voice its measured cadence will not try, 
Save I with every note consent to sing ; 
I cannot raise my hands to hurt or bless, 
But I with every action must conspire ; 
To show me there how little I possess, 
And yet that little more than I desire ; 
May each new act my new allegiance prove, 
Till in thy perfect love I ever live and move. 



POEMS, 129 



ENOCH. 



I looked to find a man who walked with God, 
Like the translated patriarch of old ; — 
Though gladdened millions on his footstool trod, 
Yet none with him did such sweet converse hold ; 
I heard the wind in low complaint go by 
That none its melodies like him could hear ; 
Day unto day spoke wisdom from on high, 
Yet none like David turned a willing ear ; 
God walked alone unhonored through the earth ; 
For him no heart-built temple open stood, 
The soul forgetful of her nobler birth 
Had hewn him lofty shrines of stone and wood, 
And left unfinished and in ruins still 
The only temple he delights to fill. 



130 POEMS. 



THE MORNING WATCH. 

'Tis near the morning watch, the dim lamp burns 
But scarcely shows how dark the slumbering street; 
No sound of life the silent mart returns ; 
No friends from house to house their neighbors 

greet ; 
It is the sleep of death ; a deeper sleep 
Than e'er before on mortal eyelids fell ; 
No stars above the gloom their places keep ; 
No faithful watchmen of the morning tell ; 
Yet still they slumber on, though rising day 
Hath through their windows poured the awakening 

light; 
Or, turning in their sluggard trances, say — 
" There yet are many hours to fill the night ;" 
They rise not yet ; while on the bridegroom goes 
'Till he the day's bright gates forever on them close ! 



POEMS. 131 



THE LIVING GOD. 



There is no death with Thee ! each plant and tree 
In living haste their stems push onward still, 
The pointed blade, each rooted trunk we see 
In various movement all attest thy will ; 
The vine must die when its long race is run, 
The tree must fall when it no more can rise ; 
The worm has at its root his task begun, 
And hour by hour his steady labor plies ; 
Nor man can pause but in thy will must grow, 
And, as his roots within more deep extend, 
He shall o'er sons of sons his branches throw, 
And to the latest born his shadows lend ; 
Nor know in thee disease nor length of days, 
But lift his head forever in thy praise. 



132 POEMS. 



THE GARDEN. 

I saw the spot where our first parents dwelt ; 
And yet it wore to me no face of change, 
For while amid its fields and groves I felt 
As if I had not sinned, nor thought it strange ; 
My eye seemed but a part of every sight, 
My ear heard music in each sound that rose, 
Each sense forever found a new delight, 
Such as the spirit's vision only knows ; 
Each act some new and ever-varying joy 
Did by my father's love for me prepare ; 
To dress the spot my ever fresh employ, 
And in the glorious whole with Him to share ; 
No more without the flaming gate to stray, 
No more for sin's dark stain the debt of death to pay. 



POEMS. 133 



THE SONG. 

When I would sing of crooked streams and fields, 

On, on from me they stretch too far and wide, 

And at their look my song all powerless yields, 

And down the river bears me with its tide ; 

Amid the fields I am a child again, 

The spots that then I loved I love the more, 

My fingers drop the strangely-scrawling pen, 

And I remember nought but nature's lore ; 

I plunge me in the river's cooling wave, 

Or on the embroidered bank admiring lean, 

Now some endangered insect life to save, 

Now watch the pictured flowers and grasses green ; 

Forever playing where a boy I played, 

By hill and grove, by field and stream delayed. 



134 POEMS. 



LOVE. 



I asked of Time to tell me where was Love ; 
He pointed to her foot-steps on the snow, 
Where first the angel lighted from above, 
And bid me note the way and onward go ; 
Through populous streets of cities spreading wide, 
By lonely cottage rising on the moor, 
Where bursts from sundered cliff the struggling 

tide, 
To where it hails the sea with answering roar, 
She led me on ; o'er mountains' frozen head, 
Where mile on mile still stretches on the plain, • 
Then homeward whither first my feet she led, 
I traced her path along the snow again, 
But there the sun had melted from the earth 
The prints where first she trod, a child of mortal 

birth. 



POEMS. 135 



DAY. 



Day ! I lament that none can hymn thy praise 
In fitting strains, of all thy riches bless ; 
Though thousands sport them in thy golden rays, 
Yet none like thee their Maker's name confess. 
Great fellow of my being ! woke with me 
Thou dost put on thy dazzling robes of light, 
And onward from the east go forth to free 
Thy children from the bondage of the night ; 
I hail thee, pilgrim ! on thy lonely way, 
Whose looks on all alike benignant shine ; 
A child of light, like thee, I cannot stay, 
But on the world I bless must soon decline, 
New rising still, though setting to mankind, 
And ever in the eternal West my dayspring find. 



136 POEMo. 



NIGHT. 



I thank thee, Father, that the night is near 
When I this conscious being may resign ; 
Whose only task thy words of love to hear, 
And in thy acts to find each act of mine ; 
A task too great to give a child like me, 
The myriad-handed labors of the day, 
Too many for my closing eyes to see, 
Thy words too frequent for my tongue to say ; 
Yet when thou see'st me burthened by thy love, 
Each other gift more lovely then appears, 
For dark-robed night comes hovering from above, 
And all thine other gifts to me endears ; 
And while within her darkened couch I sleep, 
Thine eyes untired above will constant vigils keep. 



POEMS. 137 



THE LATTER RAIN. 

The latter rain, — it falls in anxious haste 
Upon the sun-dried fields and branches bare, 
Loosening with searching drops the rigid waste, 
As if it would each roofs lost strength repair ; 
But not a blade grows green as in the Spring, 
No swelling twig puts forth its thickening leaves ; 
The robins only mid the harvests sing 
Pecking the grain that scatters from the sheaves ; 
The rain falls still, — the fruit all ripened drops, 
It pierces chestnut burr and walnut shell, 
The furrowed fields disclose the yellow crops, 
Each bursting pod of talents used can tell, 
And all that once received the early rain 
Declare to man it was not sent in vain. 



138 POEMS, 



THE SLAVE. 

I saw him forging link by link his chain, 
Yet while he felt its length he thought him free, 
And sighed for those borne o'er the barren main 
To bondage that to his would freedom be ; 
Yet on he walked with eyes far-gazing still 
On wrongs that from his own dark bosom flowed, 
And while he thought to do his master's will 
He but the more his disobedience showed ; 
I heard a wild rose by the stony wall, 
Whose fragrance reached me in the passing gale, 
A lesson give — it gave alike to all — 
And I repeat the moral of its tale, 
u That from the spot where deep its dark roots grew 
Bloomed forth the fragrant rose that all delight to 



POEMS. 139 



BREAD. 



Long do we live upon the husks of corn, 
While 'neath untasted lie the kernels still, 
Heirs of the kingdom, but in Christ unborn, 
Fain with swine's food would we our hunger fill ; 
We eat, but 'tis not of the bread from heaven ; 
We drink, but 'tis not from the stream of life ; 
Our swelling actions want the little leaven 
To make them with the sighed-for blessing rife ; 
We wait unhappy on a stranger's board, 
While we the master's friend by right should live, 
Enjoy with him the fruits our labors stored, 
And to the poor with him the pittance give ; 
No more to want, the long expected heir 
With Christ the Father's love forevermore to share. 



140 POEMS. 



THE SPIRIT LAND. 

Father ! thy wonders do not singly stand, 

Nor far removed where feet have seldom strayed ; 

Around us ever lies the enchanted land 

In marvels rich to thine own sons displayed ; 

In finding thee are all things round us found ; 

In losing thee are all things lost beside ; 

Ears have we but in vain strange voices sound, 

And to our eyes the vision is denied ; 

We wander in the country far remote, 

Mid tombs and ruined piles in death to dwell ; 

Or on the records of past greatness dote, 

And for a buried soul the living sell ; 

While on our path bewildered falls the night 

That ne'er returns us to the fields of light. 



POEMS. 141 



WORSHIP. 



There is no worship now, — the idol stands 
Within the spirit's holy resting place ! 
Millions before it bend with upraised hands, 
And with their gifts God's purer shrine disgrace ; 
The prophet walks unhonored mid the crowd 
That to the idol's temple daily throng ; 
His voice unheard above their voices loud, 
His strength too feeble 'gainst the torrent strong ; 
But there are bounds that ocean's rage can stay 
When wave on wave leaps madly to the shore : 
And soon the prophet's word shall men obey, 
And hushed to peace the billows cease to roar ; 
For he who spoke — and warring winds kept peace, 
Commands again — and man's wild passions cease. 



142 POEMS. 



THE SOLDIER. 



He was not armed like those of eastern clime, 
Whose heavy axes felled their heathen foe ; 
Nor was he clad like those of later time, 
Whose breast- worn cross betrayed no cross below ; 
Nor was he of the tribe of Levi born, 
Whose pompous rites proclaim how vain their prayer ; 
Whose chilling words are heard at night and morn, 
Who rend their robes but still their hearts would 

spare ; 
But he nor steel nor sacred robe had on, 
Yet went he forth in God's almighty power ; 
He spoke the word whose will is ever done 
From day's first dawn till earth's remotest hour ; 
And mountains melted from his presence down, 
And hell affrighted fled before his frown. 



POEMS. 143 



THE TREES OF LIFE. 

For those who worship Thee there is no death, 
For all they do is but with Thee to dwell ; 
Now while I take from Thee this passing breath, 
It is but of thy glorious name to tell ; 
Nor words nor measured sounds have I to find, 
But in them both my soul doth ever flow ; 
They come as viewless as the unseen wind, 
And tell thy noiseless steps where'er I go ; 
The trees that grow along thy living stream, 
And from its springs refreshment ever drink, 
Forever glittering in thy morning beam 
They bend them o'er the river's grassy brink 
And as more high and wide their branches grow 
They look more fair within the depths below. 



144 POEMS. 



THE SPIRIT. 



I would not breathe, when blows thy mighty wind 
O'er desolate hill and winter-blasted plain, 
But stand in waiting hope if I may find 
Each flower recalled to newer life again 
That now unsightly hides itself from Thee, 
Amid the leaves or rustling grasses dry, 
With ice-cased rock and snowy-mantled tree 
Ashamed lest Thou its nakedness should spy ; 
But Thou shalt breathe and every rattling bough 
Shall gather leaves ; each rock with rivers flow ; 
And they that hide them from thy presence now 
In new found robes along thy path shall glow, 
And meadows at thy coming fall and rise, 
Their green waves sprinkled with a thousand eyes. 



POEMS, 145 



THE PRESENCE. 



I sit within my room, and joy to find 

That Thou who always lov'st, art with me here, 

That I am never left by Thee behind, 

But by thyself Thou keep'st me ever near ; 

The fire burns brighter when with Thee I look, 

And seems a kinder servant sent to me ; 

With gladder heart I read thy holy book, 

Because thou art the eyes by which I see ; 

This aged chair, that table, watch and door 

Around in ready service ever wait ; 

Nor can I ask of Thee a menial more 

To fill the measure of my large estate, 

For Thou thyself, with all a father's care, 

Where'er I turn, art ever with me there. 

10 



146 POEMS. 



THE DEAD. 



I see them, — crowd on crowd they walk the earth 
Dry leafless trees to autumn wind laid bare ; 
And in their nakedness find cause for mirth, 
And all unclad would winter's rudeness dare ; 
No sap doth through their clattering branches flow, 
Whence springing leaves and blossoms bright ap- 
pear ; 
Their hearts the living God have ceased to know 
Who gives the spring time to th' expectant year ; 
They mimic life, as if from him to steal 
His glow of health to paint the livid cheek ; 
They borrow words for thoughts they cannot feel, 
That with a seeming heart their tongue may speak ; 
And in their show of life more dead they live 
Than those that to the earth with many tears they 
give. 



POEMS. 147 



I WAS SICK AND IN PRISON. 

Thou hast not left the rough-barked tree to grow 
Without a mate upon the river's bank ; 
Nor dost Thou on one flower the rain bestow, 
But many a cup the glittering drops has drank ; 
The bird must sing to one who sings again, 
Else would her note less welcome be to hear ; 
Nor hast Thou bid thy word descend in vain, 
But soon some answering voice shall reach my ear ; 
Then shall the brotherhood of peace begin, 
And the new song be raised that never dies, 
That shall the soul from death and darkness win, 
And burst the prison where the captive lies ; 
And one by one new-born shall join the strain, 
Till earth restores her sons to heaven again. 



148 POEMS. 



THE VIOLET. 

Thou tellest truths unspoken yet by man 
By this thy lonely home and modest look ; 
For he has not the eyes such truths to scan, 
Nor learns to read from such a lowly book ; 
With him it is not life firm-fixed to grow 
Beneath the outspreading oaks and rising pines, 
Content this humble lot of thine to know, 
The nearest neighbor of the creeping vines ; 
Without fixed root he cannot trust like thee 
The rain will know the appointed hour to fall, 
But fears lest sun or shower may hurtful be, 
And would delay or speed them with his call ; 
Nor trust like thee when wintry winds blow cold, 
Whose shrinking form the withered leaves enfold. 



POEMS. 149 



THE HEART. 



There is a cup of sweet or bitter drink, 
Whose waters ever o'er the brim must well, 
Whence flow pure thoughts of love as angels 

think, 
Or of its daemon depths the tongue will tell ; 
That cup can ne'er be cleansed from outward stains 
While from within the tide forever flows ; 
And soon it wearies out the fruitless pains 
The treacherous hand on such a task bestows ; 
But ever bright its chrystal sides appear, 
While runs the current from its outlet pure ; 
And pilgrims hail its sparkling waters near, 
And stoop to drink the healing fountain sure, 
And bless the cup that cheers their fainting soul 
While through this parching waste they seek their 
heavenly, goal. 



150 POEMS* 



THE ROBE. 

Each naked branch, the yellow leaf or brown, 

The rugged rock, and death- deformed plain 

Lie white beneath the winter's feathery down, 

Nor doth a spot unsightly now remain ; 

On sheltering roof, on man himself it falls ; 

But him no robe, not spotless snow makes clean ; 

Beneath, his corse-like spirit ever calls, 

That on it too may fall the heavenly screen ; 

But all in vain, its guilt can never hide 

From the quick spirit's heart- deep searching eye, 

There barren plains, and caverns yawning wide 

Ever lie naked to the passer by ; 

Nor can one thought deformed the presence shun, 

But to the spirit's gaze stands bright as in the sun. 



20EM&. 151 



LIFE. 



It is not life upon Thy gifts to live, 
But, to grow fixed with deeper roots in Thee ; 
And when the sun and shower their bounties give, 
To send out thick-leaved limbs ; a fruitful tree, 
Whose green head meets the eye for many a mile, 
Whose moss-grown arms their rigid branches rear, 
And full-faced fruits their blushing welcome smile 
As to its goodly shade our feet draw near ; 
Who tastes its gifts shall never hunger more, 
For 'tis the Father spreads the pure repast, 
Who, while we eat, renews the ready store, 
Which at his bounteous board must ever last ; 
For none the bridegroom's supper shall attend, 
Who will not hear and make his word their friend 



152 POEMS* 



THE WAR. 

I saw a war, yet none the trumpet blew, 
Nor in their hands the steel- wrought weapons bare £ 
And in that conflict armed there fought but few, 
And none that in the world's loud tumults share ; 
They fought against their wills, — the stubborn foe 
That mail-clad warriors left unfought within, 
And wordy champions left unslain below, — 
The ravening wolf though drest in fleecy skin ; — 
They fought for peace, — not that the world can give, 
Whose tongue proclaims the war its hands have 

ceased 
And bids us as each other's neighbor live, 
Ere haughty Self within us has deceased ; 
They fought for him whose kingdom must increase* 
Good will to men, on earth forever peace.. 



POEMS. 153 



THE GRAVE YARD. 

My heart grows sick before the wide-spread death, 
That walks and speaks in seeming life around ; 
And I would love the corse without a breath, 
That sleeps forgotten 'neath the "cold, cold ground ; 
For these do tell the story of decay, 
The worm and rotten flesh hide not nor lie ; 
But this, though dying too from day to day, 
With a false show doth cheat the longing eye ; 
And hide the worm that gnaws the core of life, 
With painted cheek and smooth deceitful skin ; 
Covering a grave with sights of darkness rife, 
A secret cavern filled with death and sin ; 
And men walk o'er these graves and know it not, 
For in the body's health the soul's forgot. 



154 POEMS. 



THY BROTHER'S BLOOD. 

I have no Brother, — they who meet me now 

Offer a hand with their own wills defiled, 

And, while they wear a smooth unwrinkled brow, 

Know not that Truth can never be beguiled ; 

Go wash the hand that still betrays thy guilt ; — 

Before the spirit's gaze what stain can hide ? 

Abel's red blood upon the earth is spilt, 

And by thy tongue it cannot be denied ; 

I hear not with the ear, — the heart doth tell 

Its secret deeds to me untold before ; 

Go, all its hidden plunder quickly sell, 

Then shalt thou cleanse thee from thy brother's 

gore, 
Then will I take thy gift ; — that bloody stain 
Shall not be seen upon thy hand again. 



POEMS. 155 



THE JEW. 

Thou art more deadly than the Jew of old, 
Thou hast his weapons hidden in thy speech ; 
And though thy hand from me thou dost withhold, 
They pierce where sword and spear could never 

reach. 
Thou hast me fenced about with thorny talk, 
To pierce my soul with anguish while I hear ; 
And while amid thy populous streets I walk, 
I feel at every step the entering spear ; 
Go, cleanse thy lying mouth of all its guile 
That from the will within thee ever flows ; 
Go, cleanse the temple thou dost now defile, 
Then shall I cease to feel thy heavy blows ; 
And come and tread with me the path of peace, 
And from thy brother's harm forever cease. 



156 POEMS. 



FAITH. 



There is no faith ; the mountain stands within 
Still unrebuked, its summit reaches heaven ; 
And every action adds its load of sin, 
For every action wants the little leaven ; 
There is no prayer ; it is but empty sound, 
That stirs with frequent breath the yielding air, 
With every puhe they are more strongly bound, 
Who make the blood of goats the voice of prayer ; 
Oh heal them, heal them, Father, with thy word, — 
Their sins cry out to thee from every side ; 
From son and sire, from slave and master heard, 
Their voices fill the desert country wide ; 
And bid thee hasten to relieve and save, 
By him who rose triumphant o'er the grave. 



POEMS. 157 



THE ARK. 



There is no change of time and place with Thee ; 
Where'er I go, with me 'tis still the same ; 
Within thy presence I rejoice to be, 
And always hallow thy most holy name ; 
The world doth ever change ; there is no peace 
Among the shallows of its storm-vexed breast ; 
With every breath the frothy waves increase, 
They toss up mire and dirt, they cannot rest ; 
I thank Thee that within thy strong-built ark 
My soul across the uncertain sea can sail, 
And though the night of death be long and dark, 
My hopes in Christ shall reach within the veil ; 
And to the promised haven steady steer, 
Whose rest to those who love is ever near. 



158 POEMS. 



THE EARTH. 

I would lie low, the ground on which men tread, 
Swept by Thy spirit like the wind of heaven ; 
An earth where gushing springs and corn for bread, 
By me at every season should be given ; 
Yet not the water or the bread that now 
Supplies their tables with its daily food, 
But thou wouldst give me fruit for every bough, 
Such as Thou givest me, and call'st it good ; 
And water from the stream of life should flow, 
By every dwelling that thy love has built, 
Whose taste the ransomed of thy Son shall know, 
Whose robes are washed from every stain of guilt ; 
And men would own it was thy hand that blest, 
And from my bosom find a surer rest. 



POEMS. 159 



THE ROSE. 



The rose thou show'st me has lost all its hue, 
For thou dost seem to me than it less fair ; 
For when I look I turn from it to you, 
And feel the flower has been thine only care ; 
Thou could'st have grown as freely by its side 
As spring these buds from out the parent stem, 
But thou art from thy Father severed wide, 
And turnest from thyself to look at them, 
Thy words do not perfume the summer air, 
Nor draw the eye and ear like this thy flower ; 
No bees shall make thy lips their daily care, 
And sip the sweets distilled from hour to hour ; 
Nor shall new plants from out thy scattered seed, 
O'er many a field the eye with beauty feed. 



160 POEMS. 



MORNING. 



The light will never open sightless eyes, 

It comes to those who willingly would see ; 

And every object, — hill, and stream, and skies, - 

Rejoice within th' encircling line to be ; 

'Tis day, — the field is filled with busy hands, 

The shop resounds with noisy workmen's din, 

The traveller with his staff already stands 

His yet unmeasured journey to begin ; 

The light breaks gently too within the breast, — 

Yet there no eye awaits the crimson morn, 

The forge and noisy anvil are at rest, 

Nor men nor oxen tread the fields of corn, 

Nor pilgrim lifts his staff, — it is no day 

To those who find on earth their place to stay. 



POEMS. 161 



NATURE. 



The bubbling brook doth leap when I come by, 

Because my feet find measure with its call, 

The birds know when the friend they love is nigh, 

For I am known to them both great and small ; 

The flower that on the lovely hill-side grows 

Expects me there when Spring its bloom has given ; 

And many a tree and bush my wanderings knows, 

And e'en the clouds and silent stars of heaven ; 

For he who with his Maker walks aright, 

Shall be their lord as Adam was before ; 

His ear shall catch each sound with new delight, 

Each object wear the dress that then it wore ; 

And he, as when erect in soul he stood, 

Hear from his Father's lips that all is good. 

11 



162 POEMS. 



CHANGE. 



Father ! there is no change to live with Thee, 

Save that in Christ I grow from day to day, 

In each new word I hear, each thing I see, 

I but rejoicing hasten on the way ; 

The morning comes with blushes overspread, 

And I new-wakened find a morn within ; 

And in its modest dawn around me shed, 

Thou hear'st the prayer and the ascending hymn ; 

Hour follows hour, the lengthening shades descend, 

Yet they could never reach as far as me, 

Did not thy love thy kind protection lend, 

That I a child might sleep awhile on Thee, 

Till to the light restored by gentle sleep 

With new-found zeal I might thy precepts keep. 



POEMS. 163 



THE POOR. 



I walk the streets and though not meanly drest. 
Yet none so poor as can with me compare ; 
For none though weary call me into rest, 
And though I hunger, none their substance share ; 
I ask not for my stay the broken reed, 
That fails when most I want a friendly arm ; 
I cannot on the loaves and fishes feed 
That want the blessing that they may not harm ; 
I only ask the living word to hear 
From tongues that now but speak to utter death ; 
I thirst for one cool cup of water clear 
But drink the riled stream of lying breath ; 
And wander on though in my Fatherland, 
Yet hear no welcome voice and see no beckoning 
hand. 



164 P(XEMS, 



THE CLAY. 



Thou shalt do what Thou wilt with thine own hand, 
Thou form'st the spirit like the moulded clay ; 
For those who love Thee keep thy just command, 
And in thine image grow as they obey ; 
New tints and forms with every hour they take 
Whose life is fashioned by thy spirit's power ; 
The crimson dawn is round them when they wake, 
And golden triumphs wait the evening hour ; 
The queenly -sceptred night their souls receives, 
And spreads their pillows 'neath her sable tent ; 
Above them Sleep their palm with poppy weaves, 
Sweet rest Thou hast to all who labor lent ; 
That they may rise refreshed to light again 
And with Thee gather in the whitening grain. 



POEMS, 165 



WHO HATH EARS TO HEAR LET HIM 
HEAR. 

The sun doth not the hidden place reveal, 
Whence pours at morn his golden flood of light ; 
But what the night's dark breast would fain conceal, 
In its true colors walks before our sight ; 
The bird does not betray the secret springs, 
Whence note on note her music sweetly pours ; 
Yet turns the ear attentive while she sings, 
The willing heart while falls the strain adores ; 
So shall the spirit tell not whence its birth, 
But in its light thine untold deeds lay bare ; 
And while it walks with thee flesh-clothed the earth, 
Its words shall of the Father's love declare ; 
And happy those whose ears shall hail its voice, 
And clean within the day it gives rejoice- 



166 POEMS. 



TO THE PURE ALL THINGS ARE PURE 

The flowers I pass have eyes that look at me, 
The birds have ears that hear my spirit's voice, 
And I am glad the leaping brook to see, 
Because it does at my light step rejoice. 
Come, brothers, all who tread the grassy hill, 
Or wander thoughtless o'er the blooming fields, 
Come learn the sweet obedience of the will ; 
Thence every sight and sound new pleasure yields- 
Nature shall seem another house of thine, 
When he who formed thee, bids it live and play, 
And in thy rambles e'en the creeping vine 
Shall keep with thee a jocund holiday, 
And every plant, and bird, and insect, be 
Thine own companions born for harmony.- 



POEMS. 167 



HE WAS ACQUAINTED WITH GRIEF. 

I cannot tell the sorrows that I feel 

By the night's darkness, by the prison's gloom ; 

There is no sight that can the death reveal 

The spirit suffers in a living tomb ; 

There is no sound of grief that mourners raise, 

No moaning of the wind, or dirge-like sea, 

Nor hymns, though prophet tones inspire the lays, 

That can the spirit's grief awake in thee. 

Thou too must suffer as it suffers here 

The death in Christ to know the Father's love ; 

Then in the strains that angels love to hear 

Thou too shalt hear the Spirit's song above, 

And learn in grief what these can never tell, 

A note too deep for earthly voice to swell. 



168 POEMS, 



YE GAVE ME NO MEAT. 

My brother, I am hungry, — give me food 

Such as my Father gives me at his board ; 

He has for many years been to thee good, 

Thou canst a morsel then to me afford ; 

I do not ask of thee a grain of that 

Thou offerest when I call on thee for bread ; 

This is not of the wine nor olive fat, 

But those who eat of this like thee are dead ; 

I ask the love the Father has for thee, 

That thou should'st give it back to me again ; 

This shall my soul from pangs of hunger free, 

And on my parched spirit fall like rain ; 

Then thou wilt prove a brother to my need, 

For in the cross of Christ thou too canst bleed. 



POEMS. 169 



THE ACORN. 



The seed has started, — who can stay it ? see, 
The leaves are sprouting high above the ground ; 
Already o'er the flowers, its head ; the tree 
That rose beside it and that on it frowned, 
Behold ! is but a small bush by its side. 
Still on ! it cannot stop ; its branches spread ; 
It looks o'er all the earth in giant pride. 
The nations find upon its limbs their bread, 
Its boughs their millions shelter from the heat, 
Beneath its shade see kindreds, tongues, and all 
That the wide world contains, they all retreat 
Beneath the shelter of that acorn small 
That late thou flung away ; 'twas the best gift 
That heaven e'er gave ; — its head the low shall lift. 



170 POEMS. 



THE RAIL ROAD. 

Thou great proclaimer to the outward eye 
Of what the spirit too would seek to tell, 
Onward thou go'st, appointed from on high 
The other warnings of the Lord to swell ; 
Thou art the voice of one that through the world 
Proclaims in startling tones, " Prepare the way ;" 
The lofty mountain from its seat is hurled, 
The flinty rocks thine onward march obey ; 
The valleys lifted from their lowly bed 
O'ertop the hills that on them frowned before, 
Thou passest where the living seldom tread, 
Through forests dark, where tides beneath thee roar, 
And bid'st man's dwelling from thy track remove, 
And would with warning voice his crooked paths 
reprove. 



POEMS. 171 



THE DISCIPLE. 



Thou wilt my hands employ, though others find 
No work for those who praise thy name aright ; 
And in their worldly wisdom call them blind, 
Whom thou has blest with thine own spirit's sight. 
But while they find no work for thee to do, 
And blindly on themselves alone rely ; 
The child must suffer what thou sufferest too 
And learn from him thou sent e'en so to die ; 
Thou art my Father, thou wilt give me aid 
To bear the wrong the Spirit suffers here ; 
• Thou hast thy help upon the mighty laid, 
In him I trust, nor know to want or fear, 
But ever onward walk secure from sin, 
For he has conquered every foe within. 



172 POEMS. 



TIME. 



There is no moment but whose flight doth bring 
Bright clouds and fluttering leaves to deck my 

bower ; 
And I within like some sweet bird must sing 
To tell the story of the passing hour ; 
For time has secrets that no bird has sung, 
Nor changing leaf with changing season told ; 
They wait the utterance of some nobler tongue 
Like that which spoke in prophet tones of old ; 
Then day and night, and month and year shall tell 
The tale that speaks but faint from bird and bough ; . 
In spirit-songs their praise shall upward swell 
Nor longer pass heaven's gate unheard as now, 
But cause e'en angels' ears to catch the strain, 
And send it back to earth in joy again. 



POEMS, 173 



THE CALL. 



Why art thou not awake, my son ? 
The morning breaks I formed for thee ; 
And I thus early by thee stand, 
Thy new-awakening life to see. 

Why art thou not awake, my son ? 
The birds upon the bough rejoice ; 
And I thus early by thee stand, 
To hear with theirs thy tuneful voice* 

Why sleep'st thou still ? the laborers all 
Are in my vineyard ; — hear them toil* 
As for the poor with harvest song, 
They treasure up the wine and oil. 

I come to wake thee ; haste, arise, 
Or thou no share with me can find ; 
Thy sandals seize, gird on thy clothes* 
Or I must leave thee here behind. 



174 POEMS. 

THE COTTAGE. 

The house my earthly parent left 
My heavenly parent still throws down, 
For 'tis of air and sun bereft, 
Nor stars its roof with beauty crown. 

He gave it me, yet gave it not 
As one whose gifts are wise and good ; 
'Twas but a poor and clay-built cot, 
And for a time the storms withstood. 

But lengthening years and frequent rain 
O'ercame its strength ; it tottered, fell, 
And left me homeless here again, 
And where to go I could not tell. 

But soon the light and open air 
Received me as a wandering child, 
And I soon thought their house more fair, 
And all my grief their love beguiled. 

Mine was the grove, the pleasant field 
Where dwelt the flowers I daily trod ; 
And there beside them too I kneeled 
And called their friend my friend and God. 



POEMS. 175 

THE PRAYER. 

Wilt Thou not visit me ? 
The plant beside me feels thy gentle dew ; 

And every blade of grass I see, 
From thy deep earth its moisture drew. 

Wilt Thou not visit me ? 
Thy morning calls on me with cheering tone ; 

And every hill and tree 
Lend but one voice, the voice of Thee alone. 

Come, for I need thy love, 
'More than the flower the dew, or grass the rain ; 

Come, gently as thy holy dove ; 
And let me in thy sight rejoice to live again. 

I will not hide from them, 
When thy storms come, though fierce may be their 
wrath ; 

But bow with leafy stem, 
And strengthened follow on thy chosen path. 

Yes, Thou wilt visit me ; 
Nor plant nor tree thy eye delight so well, 

As w^hen from sin set free 
My spirit loves with thine in peace to dwell. 



rb aal 




0* 




'oV 



*< 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process 






Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: Oct. 2009 



PreservationTechnologies 




*W 



4 



:^ 



4 1 ^ 



A WORLD LEADER IN COLLECTIONS PRESERVATION 

111 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
(724)779-2111 



V ,v 






% 



* -A *U 
















^cr 




'" ***<>' ^> 











OCSBS BROS. 

LIBRARY BiNOINO 









ST.MJGUST.NE> *V*SJfc*-. % ** ,^" 

FLA. <*.,,♦ "JlMI^- ^ 




■32084 e>^. 



„^ 



5' ^ 





UW 



